She's the life of the garden party

Carolyn Weston is a combination figurehead, orchestrator, party planner, and traffic cop.

As director of the New England Spring Flower Show, Weston is coordinating some 1,200 volunteers and 450 exhibitors who are faced with the challenge of making 2 million blossoms bloom impressively and on time.

It's her responsibility to see that the 1,500 varieties of plants, trees, and shrubs in the show are properly watered and tended, each labeled with its common and Latin names, all attractively displayed for the duration of the show. Her job is something like "throwing a party for 130,000 people that lasts nine days," said Keith Hutchins, cochair of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society's Board of Trustees.

The 39-year-old Marlborough resident has to be well-organized. She is -- and then some.

"I know about binders," she quipped. "Everything has a place, and everything's in its place."

She's so organized, Weston jovially admitted, that she has a spreadsheet laying out what she is wearing for the 16 most hectic days before and during the show, which opened yesterday at the Bayside Expo Center. Her home is a model of organization, with everything neatly arranged by category. Her basement is fastidious. Even her CD collection is alphabetized, by artist.

Her penchant for organization comes naturally. Raised in Framingham by a librarian mother and a father who worked as a computer engineer, "I was kind of born to plot things out, keep detailed records, and alphabetize."

It's a talent for details that the Massachusetts Horticultural Society is glad to put to use, Hutchins said.

Flower show exhibits often require elaborate plumbing and electricity, and sophisticated lighting. They incorporate waterfalls, trellises, and masonry -- as well as 20 tons of rocks and enough mulch to cover 15 football fields, all carefully squeezed into one indoor conference center. Especially during the four days before the show's opening, when participants were assembling their exhibits, "they used to throw up their arms and fight like basketball players trying to protect their space," Hutchins said.

Not anymore. When Weston became the show's director last year, she created an elaborate move-in flow chart that assigns everyone a precisely scheduled time slot to unload their materials, Hutchins noted. "Now it's all very smooth."

To make sure that everyone would know exactly where each exhibit should be located, Weston entered the Expo Center about a month ago armed with numerous dispensers of white shoe polish. She used them, she said, to mark the borders of every exhibit and every aisle on the convention center's floor.

Such logistics are important to the success of the show because many flowers are fragile and need a controlled climate, she explained. For instance, some of them might not tolerate being located too close to a door that opens frequently, letting in cold air.

Last week, Weston was sitting in her makeshift office at the Expo Center. As she spoke, sounds of heavy moving equipment and power saws could be heard in the background. She provided a little tour.

In one hall, a glass conservatory with a patio and pond -- the creation of a landscaper from Natick -- was taking shape. Nearby, a caterpillar tractor was moving half-ton stones to form a wildflower meadow, part of this year's entry from the New England Wild Flower Society, based in Framingham. All around them, forklifts were hauling huge rocks, trees, and statuary. Front-end loaders were moving mulch.

In another hall, exhibitors were testing a large reflecting pond to make sure it would be watertight. Draperies were being hung. A gallery-like area was being painted in pastel shades to form the backdrop for this year's amateur flower arrangements. Everything seemed to be proceeding in a methodical way.

"I like being the one who helps with that one little detail that lets someone move on to the next step," Weston said.

Weston was born in New Jersey, and moved to Framingham when she was 2. Her parents always wanted to have a nice garden, but the future director of the New England Spring Flower Show balked at helping out. Gardening just didn't interest her.

She attended the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, majoring in journalism, and then worked for a "job finder" newspaper that sponsored job fairs and sold space at them to advertisers. Weston did marketing and advertising, and found she loved it.

She joined the Massachusetts Horticultural Society's flower show staff in 1997, when she ran the retail sales side of the event. The following year, she became assistant director. That was the year she married Troy Weston, a warehouse operations manager for a pharmaceutical robotics manufacturer, and the couple moved to Marlborough. Last year, she was promoted to head the show.

She still doesn't garden much and doesn't have a greenhouse, Weston said. But her association with the Horticultural Society and the legions of flower experts associated with the spring show have sharpened her skills. And now her husband is intent that they should have "the ultimate lawn," she said, with a chuckle.

As she strolled around the halls of the Expo Center, Weston downplayed her own role as chief organizer. She noted that she is drawing on the help of the entire staff of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, many members of local garden clubs and nurseries, and about 1,000 other volunteers, as well as some people hired specially to help with this event. Many of them have been involved with the show for several years.

"We even have some second- and third-generation flower show helpers," she said. After 133 years of this New England tradition, "the flower show has a life of its own."

One of the second generation of flower show contributors is Sandy Heimlich, who heads Heimlich Nurseries in Woburn. He recently found a 1936 flower show program in which his father had two exhibits, he said. And he remembered sleeping on a big bag of peat moss when he was 9 or 10 years old, while his father built their exhibits. This year, his children are helping with the nursery's entry, which features a brook, a pool, and a waterfall, surrounded by hundreds of perennials.

Flower shows, Heimlich observed, "get in the blood."

Weston said her challenge is to showcase all this skill and experience while also making this year's show new and exciting. She hopes that this show's theme, "Deeply Rooted," will help to emphasize this goal, and that the March weather, and external events, will cooperate.

After a brutally cold winter, she thinks people are more than ready for spring. And she's ready to celebrate it. Before last year's show ended, she was already planning this year's event.

"I've never given birth to a child, but I think this must be something like that," Weston said. "When it finally comes, you're so exhausted that you tell yourself, never again! But then you get your second wind, and you can't wait to start planning for the next one."