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Showgirls: They’re Painting the Garbage Cans Green
by DIG-IT
It’s almost Showtime at Springfest Flower & Garden Show, “the garden lover’s show,” in Augusta, New Jersey. From March 11 thru 14, the Sussex County Fairgrounds will fling open its doors to bring on Spring.
Springfest, now in its 14th year, is produced and managed entirely by volunteers. It is a work of art and community, rather than commercial venture. Last year, the show boasted 50 juried vendors, a dozen educational exhibitors, 12 display gardens and a gifted multi-million dollar conservatory.
As one of the few nonprofit flower shows left in the U.S., it provides scholarships and promotes agriculture by improving fairground facilities for a better visitor experience. The 12-member Springfest committee’s jobs include: promotion, exhibitors, website, sponsorships, decorating, People’s Choice Awards, caterer: Zagat-rated Krave Café, layout, planning, facilities, window box competition, licensing/permits, chair/table rentals, PA system, lectures, treasurer and program.
This winter, ten gardeners of Three Seasons Inc, a local garden design business, morphed into “set designers” and crafters to design and make decorations for the show’s big tent and greenhouse, plus items to sell in the Boutique, whose proceeds support scholarships.
The madness began right after last year’s show. Once employees Louise Vander Haeghen and Kathy Jamieson developed a theme, their crew began gathering materials. With a working theme of “Adirondack,” they’ve been harvesting Nature’s decorations such as moss, acorns, mushrooms, lichen, birch bark, stones (they make their own boulders), stumps, branches and scouring garage sales for trinkets and costume jewelry to add a little light and glitz.
But, as Lewis Carroll’s King said, let’s “begin at the beginning.” At the main entrance, Springfest visitors enter through the Window Box display – a row of six house facades with flower boxes and front lawn, seeded by the ladies weeks ago.
They’ll paint the trash cans green and turn them into sunflowers with giant petals strung on a bungee for easy trash removal. (They’re not only ingenious, they’re practical, too.) They’ll place leafy birch branches and ferns into tall, handmade wooden planters (everything is handmade) that wrap around the greenhouse’s support posts, in keeping with the woodsy theme surrounding the display gardens.
The conservatory needs no decoration other than itself. In its center, the Boutique, itself handmade by the crew’s gents and lavishly adorned, will sell goodies the ladies (mothers, daughters, teens and friends) have made such as Adirondack-themed picture frames – each with its own original “Adirondack” painting, mind you – and usable, washable, hand-painted canvas floor cloths, each one original art.
Vander Haeghen and Jamieson get ideas for things to sell from anywhere. At the New York International Gift Fair and other shows this year, they saw nothing exciting or new so they came up with their own ideas – including one from The New York Botanical Garden Train Show: embellished bird houses to sell individually and as parts of miniature gardens.
In Exhibition Hall, the crew is in mid construction of a waterfall for the Three Seasons display garden. Owner and boss, Marty Carson, designed the garden and the crew set to work. First the guys built a three-piece frame of plywood and 2 x 4s and covered it in chicken wire. The ladies dipped burlap in plaster, then attached it to the wire. Lastly, they coated the plaster with a rock mixture that taxidermists use, adding the three pieces as needed, and shaped them into boulders. Forced willow branches will spill over the boulders and ferns pockets in this waterfall replica.
“It’s a challenge every year for us. We’re lucky we have a boss who allows us to be creative,” says Jamieson. Adds Vander Haeghen: “This is what makes our show so special because we do have our boss, the show’s sponsor, who allows us to be creative.”
Over to Horticulture Hall, located inside the huge tent, with more vendors, educational exhibits and a café. This is where it all began, years ago when the ladies simply wanted to get rid of the tent feel. “We just start,” they say in unison, “get an idea and wing it. As we go on, the ideas get better.” This year, creating began on a rainy September day, then became more frequent as gardening work for Three Seasons slowed.
Before the waterfall, the ladies practiced boulder building on the café’s freestanding “outdoor” fireplace. Dining customers will warm themselves by its fire on “the deck of an Adirondack cabin,” surrounded by leafy birch trees and evergreens. They’ll gaze over the deck railing – made of donated Christmas tree trunks and tree stumps that Vander Haeghen and Jamieson dragged out of the woods and trucked off – at the mountain lake scenery.
“As we drive the country roads, it’s amazing what we find,” says Jamieson. They picked up just right curved branches from ditches and woods to make window frames above the deck’s long railing. The café, itself, will be operated from behind a façade of a woodsy hut with pots of birch branches as columns to support its roof. The women have yet to make a cedar shake roof, then disassemble the cabin’s railing, fireplace, café façade and backdrop, then transport it to the fairgrounds and install it all.
“We make it here in the barn and we have to visualize how it will be,” says Vander Haeghen of everything. “It’s never all put together (during the process) so there will be some little things we have to work out.” Jamieson adds: “We don’t know till we get through how things will fall into place. There are a lot of last minute changes. The last few days are very unnerving, but we don’t ever worry about it.”
And it’s not just artsy that the ladies must be. They claim responsibility for transportation logistics and, once the props are installed at the show, their sturdiness and safety.
Meanwhile, back in Carson’s greenhouse, begonias root to grow for sale. All other plants – palms, orchids, ferns, you name it – owned by Three Seasons – will be cleaned, trimmed and transported to the show to show off wherever greenery is needed. Magnolia, birch, quince and willow sit in huge buckets and a pond, absorbing the sun’s energy for the day they leaf out and beautify Springfest for visitors.
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published February 14, 2010
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