George Weigel | Special to PennLive

14 cool sights making waves at the 2018 Philadelphia Flower Show

From the indoor rainforest at the main entrance to the aquatic plants in the 180-vendor marketplace, water is everywhere over the Philadelphia Flower Show’s 10 acres.

"Wonders of Water" is the 2018 theme of the world's biggest, oldest indoor flower show, taking place through Sunday inside the Pennsylvania Convention Center, 12th and Arch streets, Philadelphia.

Here’s a look at some of the sights making splashes…

Read more in our Insider’s Guide to the 2018 Philadelphia Flower Show



See a photo gallery of 63 pictures from the show

Take a video mini-tour of the show

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George Weigel | Special to PennLive

The rainforest

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You don’t see a rainforest in Philadelphia in early March every day, but this one has 4,000 blooming begonias, kalanchoe, orchids, protea, and other colorful tropicals hanging from a 20-foot-tall bamboo framework.

The sound of splashing water and recorded birds completes the effect of transporting show-goers from Arch Street to the Amazon.

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George Weigel | Special to PennLive

The rope bridge

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A nice touch to the rainforest is a wooden-slat rope bridge that leads between a pair of tropical ponds.

The “bridge” actually lays flat on the ground, but it seems like a real one. Kind of.

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George Weigel | Special to PennLive

The five-drop waterfall

Most impressive of the waterfalls is the 25-foot-tall one that drops water at five different levels before finally ending up in a large pond surrounded by bromeliads, begonias, coleus, SunPatiens, and purple-hearts.

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George Weigel | Special to PennLive

Water, woods, and a wedding

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One garden the crowd is raving about is Robertson’s Flowers wedding setting in the woods.

It has a white-orchid-covered wedding arch, log benches, a floor of tree-branch discs, and a wedding table made from a huge tree stump.

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George Weigel | Special to PennLive

The 20-foot shower

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Robertson’s wedding scene is backdropped by a rain curtain that’s dropping a shower of water about 20 feet long into a pool below.

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George Weigel | Special to PennLive

The tubes

The Windows on a Watershed exhibit traces the journey of water down the Delaware River.

But the most eye-grabbing part is overhead, where some 300 Lucite tubes filled with different shades of tulle material hang from the ceiling. The long, glistening tubes are a sculptural interpretation of rain.

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George Weigel | Special to PennLive

The desert

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What happens when you don’t have water? You end up with a desert.

That’s the Stoney Bank Nurseries take on the Wonders of Water theme… a surprisingly interesting garden of various kinds of cactus, euphorbia, aloes, agaves, and echeveria planted on sandy, rocky mounds.

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George Weigel | Special to PennLive

Wrecked boats

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Water sometimes causes trouble when we get too much of it.

WISH Unlimited is getting lots of attention for its display called “hereafter,” which features three boats that have run aground following a hurricane.

The landscaping shows what it might look like when plants eventually try to grow up around (and in) the beached boats.

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George Weigel | Special to PennLive

A hydroponic dome garden

The New Jersey-based Rooted Affair set up a curious new creation in the form of a wooden, spherical hydroponic garden.

This dome, which you can go into, grows edibles in water-filled trays on five different levels, producing a lot of indoor veggies and sprouts in a small space.

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The clivia plant is the yellow-flowered one at right. The red-bloomer is Dodo's amaryllis. George Weigel | Special to PennLive

Dodo's clivia

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In memory of Dorrance “Dodo” Hamilton, who won tons of blue ribbons over the years in the show’s amateur competitions, the show is displaying some of the specimen plants that her estate donated to Longwood Gardens.

Most impressive is the hard-to-grow clivia, a bulb that produces big, showy, yellow flowers if you do everything right. Hamilton’s is a good 6 feet tall and wide and in pristine shape.

Hamilton died last April.

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George Weigel | Special to PennLive

The stench flower

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Not all plants are as beautiful as the clivia. But that doesn’t mean they can’t draw us in anyway.

One of the show’s popular attractions is the collection of 10 voodoo lilies that took part in the amateur-grower judging.

This is the plant whose pointed burgundy blooms smell either like garbage or rotting flesh, depending on your point of reference.

The point is to attract pollinating flies, not people, but few show-goers are resisting the challenge of the exhibit’s sign to “smell me.”

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George Weigel | Special to PennLive

Columnar stone fountains

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One of the most elegant water-moving accessories at the show are the columnar lava rocks turned into fountains by Hampden Twp.'s own Igneous Rock Gallery.

Owner Robert Wertz built a beautiful display of these multi-colored volcanic rocks that are unique to a small quarry in Washington State.

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George Weigel | Special to PennLive

Vegepods

A novel product being unveiled in the U.S. in the marketplace is the Vegepod, a veggie-growing contraption that won Australian's version of the Shark Tank in 2017.

Vegepods are polypropylene, snap-together, self-watering growing containers that come in three sizes ($169-$374) and can be used on the ground, on legs, or on wheeled legs.

They not only water themselves from the reservoirs underneath, but a lid that’s covered with a durable mesh folds down over the unit to keep out everything from deer to birds to slugs.

It’s a nearly fool-proof invention that will be showing up in garden centers this spring.

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George Weigel | Special to PennLive

Metal yard art

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From the number of sales flying out of a huge sales booth specializing in metal items, it appears a lot of yards will have metal art in them this year.

Sutherland Iron Work was selling everything from 6-foot-tall spinning weather vanes to little whirligigs made out of old spoons.

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George Weigel | Special to PennLive

Five more days to see it

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The 2018 Philadelphia Flower Show runs through Sunday, March 11, at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, 12th and Arch streets, Philadelphia. Online tickets are $33 for adults, $22 for students and $17 for children ($19-$40 at the box office). More information and advance tickets are available on the show's website.

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For video from the show:

See a video from this past weekend’s Pennsylvania Garden Show of York

You can meet Martha Stewart at the Philadelphia Flower Show