It’s been my pleasure to help set up this show for many, many years (10, 15?) I was the central display designer twice-a herculean task that was one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done. I look at set up for the show much like baseball players going to spring training, the smell of soil and green plants, the movement of mulch fork and shovel getting your muscles in shape for the upcoming year.

I’ll tell you what goes into the display, but you won’t believe me. More than 150 yards of mulch ( a yard of mulch fits in the back of a small pickup truck), an entire commercial greenhouse of forced bulbs, hundreds of perennials, and trees and shrubs forced for blooms as well. Yes, entire trees. We’re a little crazy, admittably. And that’s just the plant material. Read about more of the design for more of the scoop, including a sketch of the design.

What makes the construction of the flower show all the more remarkable, though, is the hardest to explain. At most flower shows, individual landscapers and garden centers construct their own booths, miniature landscapes amongst a green mall for a week or weekend. In Vermont, though, the green industry is a little smaller, and not many firms have the resources to pull off a booth of forced plant material. So, many years ago, the Vermont Nursery and Landscape Association teamed up to hold a flower show, then at the Sheraton, where everybody got together and built one central display, for the betterment of the industry on the whole. Competitors the rest of the year, everybody teams up and shares tasks, and creates a spring world inside on a snowy weekend.

There are many other things to do at the show as well, not just walking through the central display. The admission price alone is a steal for all the talks and hands-on seminars that are possible to attend, and kids have their own room to ‘craft’ in as well. There are even cooking demostrations, along with vendors selling gardening merchandise, and plants. I dare you to walk out of there without some forced flowers in your hand.

“What a rich book might be made about buds and, perhaps, sprouts!”

Henry David Thoreau

Red Maple

Norway Maple

Japanese Maple

Katsura Tree

Camperdown Elm-Flowers

Yellowwood

White Spruce

We don’t really like them either. They are heavy, not the most ergonomic of things to lug around, and they’re noisy. Necessary? Absolutely. Spend half of an hour in communion with a rake, and you’ll quickly understand exactly where your shoulders are, how they are supposed to move, and why it is just not possible to rake all day, or even part of a day.

Mulching leaves is a great option, and something we do as much as possible, by putting special blades on the lawn mowers. This is the ultimate in recycling-putting the leaves right back in the ground from whence they came (sort of). Unfortunately, many of the trees on campus have large leaves, and tend to drop all at once, which quickly overwhelms the ability of the mowers to chop the leaves. So we pick them up, using large vacuums, and take them to compost.

The no-mow areas are a great help this year as well. We are not picking up leaves in those locations at all, so that’s a significant amount of area we don’t need to cover anymore.

I was going to write about emissions from leaf blowers, but after some quick research on the web I decided not to even go there. It’s polarizing, to say the least. Proponents were quick to point out that all emissions from leaf blowers in use for one year equal the emissions form call cars in use for 11 hours. Opponents state how up to 30% of the fuel goes out the exhaust unburned (side note-that is on older models, not the ones we use). Regardless, after having just attended the local 350.org International Climate Day of Action, I’m feeling a little guilty, but realistic. They are tools, and a safe and efficient one, but one we would like to use as little as possible. We enjoy our work, and would like to keep doing it for a while, so we need to keep very good care of our shoulders.

We as a department have been phasing out our older models, in favor of more fuel efficient, and much quieter models, not just for the environment and the Middlebury community, but for us as users. The model we are switching to is a low emission, fuel efficient model with the lowest decibel rating on the market. They are so much more pleasant to use, in fact, that they are often the only ones in use.

So sorry about the noise, we’re not crazy about it either. We’re trying to get through it as quickly as possible. We’ve got snow to start thinking about.

Once in a while, though, a particular piece jumps out. I don’t know the artist, the class, or the professor, but hats off to this piece. Next to one of our favorite trees, a massive Black Willow disintegrating before our very eyes, this piece (don’t even know the name) has captured, I think, the spirit of the surrondings perfectly. I’m no critic, and the only art classes I’ve had are in landscape design, but I know what I like. And, to whoever made this piece, well, I’ll quote my grandfather when I’d graduated high school. “You done good”.

There are two kinds of weeds gardeners face, annual and perennial. If you don’t know, perennial weeds are the ones that come back year after year, from their roots. LIke, say, quackgrass or dandelion. Annual weeds are the ones that come back year after year just from their seeds, the plants die every year. Crabgrass is like this-crabgrass control in lawn fertilizers is nothing more than a chemical that prevents seed germination (A hysterical mistake I’ve heard someone making from my garden center days was fertilizing their lawn seed they just put down with a crabgrass preventitive fertilizer).

If you’re working in the garden now, you won’t be doing much for annual weed control, except maybe making it worse, by stirring up the soil. (Dormant seeds down in the ground coming to the light may sprout) But the perennial weeding is amazing. This early in the spring, the perennial weeds aren’t activly growing yet, as the ground is too cold. Many of the fine roots have died over the winter, and the weeds are sprouting green from stored energy in the main fleshy roots. So, without those fine roots, the weeds pull considerably easier in the wet ground. The finest weeding I’ve ever done in my life was in a January thaw. I can remember pulling a quackgrass root 12′ long out of the ground. I almost framed it.