A smaller show grows in Boston

Horticulturists ready Blooms! for Financial District

''Massachusetts Sunset'' (above) and Piyatida Hoisangwan (below left) and Nonglak Meethong at last year's flower show. (David L. Ryan/Globe Staff/file)

The 137-year-old New England Spring Flower Show has been a well loved Boston tradition, the oldest continuously mounted indoor horticultural display in the world. Last year at the Bayside Expo Center, almost 100,000 people ambled through 5 acres of flower arrangements and indoor gardens of rare plants labeled in botanical Latin, interspersed with waterfalls and fish ponds.

The financially strapped Massachusetts Horticultural Society canceled this year's event, but it will stage a smaller, three-day horticultural event in the Financial District March 13-15 called Blooms! This new, downscaled show will be held in the lobbies of One International Place, the InterContinental Boston, and 125 High Street.

"No vendors. No landscapes. Just the flower arrangement competition from the old show and an amateur competition and the bonsai and orchid societies and some other plant groups," said Kathy Thomas, an MHS board member and past president of the Garden Club Federation of Massachusetts, which is staging the largest element of the all-volunteer exhibition. "But it's free. And that's a big thing in this economy."

One of the themes of the flower show will be Boston Landmarks, so this may be your only opportunity to see floral interpretations of Logan Airport and the Federal Reserve Bank. Lectures (not all of them free) will include Roger Swain, former host of "The Victory Garden." A gala is planned for March 14.

Still, it will not be the 138th New England Spring Flower Show, so the claim to the world's longest run of such shows will be broken.

"We wanted to do something nice for people who look forward to the Flower Show in March, but we don't want to mislead them," said Betsy Ridge Madsen, new director of the board of trustees.

The lobbies where Blooms! will be set are next to the three parcels of the Rose Kennedy Greenway where the MHS installed several hundred thousand dollars worth of irrigation, trees, shrubs, and perennials last year, following a design plan by Craig Halvorson, who also designed Post Office Square. Though there won't be anything much blooming there in March during the show, once warm weather arrives, the 5-acre site will boast the most color of any Greenway garden, according to MHS board member and Greenway Gardens chairwoman Diane Valle.

"It's more work than I thought, but I've been waiting 25 years for this garden," Valle said. Some 300 volunteers helped plant specimens and 10,000 daffodil bulbs in November. The site should be spectacular in April.

It took decades to reduce the MHS, the country's oldest horticultural organization, from a prince to a pauper. MHS's long, unfruitful designation as the developer of three parcels of the Greenway helped drain its coffers, as did plans for a grandiose $90 million greenhouse for the site that never came near to being built. Rare book collections have been auctioned off to pay creditors. Fund-raising plunged, and management scandals rocked the organization. Former director Bob Feige resigned amid reports that he'd spent time in jail in 2007 for failure to pay employees of another business.

"Now we can't afford a new director," said Madsen. "And I'm in no hurry to get one."

Meanwhile, members are rallying. Some laid-off staffers, such as librarian Maureen Horn, have stayed on as volunteers.

Paul Miskovsky, who's known for his Boston flower show exhibits, is one of the new dynamos on the board. But for the first time in several years, he's doing an exhibit at the Rhode Island Spring Flower & Garden Show. "I like to keep busy in the winter," he explained.

Maury Ryan, who owns the successful Rhode Island flower show, is frank about trying to usurp Boston's crown.

"We are going to be the flower show of New England," Ryan said.

He has even helped start a new Rhode Island Horticultural Society in hopes of giving his for-profit show some noncommercial underpinnings. The Rhode Island flower show, Feb. 19-22, has a handsome, convenient venue at the Rhode Island Convention Center, which has a sky walk to restaurants, shopping, and inexpensive parking at the downtown Providence mall.

Meanwhile, MHS hopes it can rally the membership to stage a return of the New England Spring Flower Show in 2010.

"We got 1,200 responses to our member survey," said Madsen. "The flower show was way above everything else in member interest."