Trends and Takeaways from the Northwest Flower and Garden Festival

Discover the best tips for your garden

The Northwest Flower and Garden Show is an annual highlight of the gardening community in the Pacific Northwest and draws visitors from across the country. The second-largest in the U.S., it offers an irresistible gumbo of life-size display gardens, immersive experiences like “Travelers’ Tea,” and this year, over 100 lectures over five days. For the plant-minded, you come away with a heart and mind bursting with inspiration - and a bag full of new plants. Each year, the show gives us hope in the still-dark days of February that the sun will return.

It’s always a bit of a whirlwind physically and mentally, and never more so than this year for me. Why? In addition to having friends from near and far to connect with, I spoke on the DIY stage for the first time, demonstrating strange-looking but very effective seed-starting techniques: winter sowing and the recently viral seed snails. If you missed it, see my blog post on winter sowing or this article on seed snails.

This was a very good year. The display gardens were top-notch and full of takeaways to apply at home, no matter how small a growing space you have.

The plant marketplace is always full of surprises.

Here are a few favorites, including a rare variegated and fuzzy primula, Tacca chantrieri, the bat flower, a “vegetable rose” mimicking a cabbage (full disclosure: that one was in a display garden), and the world’s first all-purple GMO tomato ‘The Purple Tomato.’ Billed as the most healthy tomato, it’s packed with anthocyanins - the same compound that makes blueberries blue - and vitamins A and C. It's available this year as started plants through select distributors, like Little Prince in Oregon, or you can buy seeds from the originator, Norfolk Produce.

Rarities galore

'The Purple' tomato

The marketplace was full of non-plant temptations, too.

Cyanotype art from Pacific Bloom Studio is co-created with the sun on reactive paper. A dreamy English greenhouse I could sleep in. Assorted antiques and lookalikes to adorn your garden.

While each year has its zeitgeist, some new patterns are emerging that make me excited about the future of gardening. Flower show displays can get away with being nothing more than beautiful stage sets, but we are seeing that less and less. The display gardens, from the landscape-inspired main displays to the patio-styled City Living displays, exemplified meaning and offered messages underlying their thoughtful choices. Similar themes were echoed in lecture topics and the wares sold in the marketplace. Here are a few of the signs of change I saw at the show: