Providence Hospital Foundation is bringing back its Festival of Flowers for a 17th year, with the four-day event set for March 25-28, 2010, on the Providence Hospital campus in Mobile. What began as a hospital fundraiser has grown into one of the signature events of Mobile’s spring, a four-day celebration that transforms a hospital lawn into a landscape of gardens, exhibits and vendors from across the country.
The flower-and-garden showcase, staged under tents and open sky, has grown into one of the largest events of its kind on the Gulf Coast, filling more than 300,000 square feet with exhibits, gardens and vendor displays. The scale is difficult to picture until seen: acres of tents, themed gardens built to be walked through, and aisles of displays that draw gardeners, designers and families from across the region.
The festival has been recognized for more than a decade by the Southeast Tourism Society as one of its Top 20 Events for the month of March, and it has drawn praise over the years from community groups, industry organizations and area tourism leaders. That standing places the festival alongside the Southeast’s marquee events and gives Mobile a national credential in the competitive business of heritage and cultural tourism.
Proceeds from the event support Providence Hospital Foundation, which channels the funds into the hospital’s mission of health care and community service. The formula has made the festival a model of the benefit-event genre: a cause, a venue and a theme ambitious enough to keep volunteers, designers and visitors coming back year after year.
‘Stand By Me’: the 2010 theme
Organizers built the 2010 festival around the theme “Stand By Me,” weaving international music and flowers into a global tapestry of gardens meant to carry visitors from England to Holland to Asia and points between. Each year’s theme gives the designers a creative brief and the visitors a journey, and this year’s world tour promises a stamp-collector’s itinerary inside a tent.
A giant Old World-style windmill anchors one display, reimagining a familiar energy concept with a modern twist. The windmill serves as both centerpiece and conversation piece — a nod to Holland’s iconic landscape built with contemporary sensibilities, and the kind of signature installation that photographs well and anchors a visitor’s memory of the show.
A new addition this year, the Floral Couture exhibit, features whimsical outfits fashioned entirely from greenery and flowers. The exhibit pushes the festival beyond garden design into wearable art, challenging florists and designers to think in fabric terms with entirely plant-based materials — bodices of leaves, skirts of petals, and structures that hold their shape for days under tent lights.
Elsewhere on the grounds, flowers from every continent and subcontinent are on display, alongside a Garden-scape and floral-design exhibit featuring artist in residence Sarah Haas. The breadth of plant material — tropicals, hardy perennials, bulbs, annuals and specimens rarely seen in Gulf Coast gardens — is part of what distinguishes the festival from a typical flower show, offering both inspiration and education in a single walk.
For gardeners, artists and families
Beyond the floral displays, the festival offers something for home gardeners, artists and families alike. Master Gardeners are on hand throughout the event to answer questions and offer advice to home gardeners, turning the show’s inspiration into practical guidance — what grows on the Gulf Coast, what fails, and how to make the transition from a display garden to a backyard bed.
The Gardener’s Galleria brings in vendors from across the country selling art and goods for the home and garden, while a separate area sells garden gear and equipment. The shopping component is a draw in its own right, offering tools, furniture, ornaments and art that most visitors cannot find in a single trip to a nursery or big-box store.
The World of Photography contest showcases local visual talent, and the Seeds of Wisdom exhibit transforms written works by local literary enthusiasts into floral designs. The contests give the festival its community character: photographers submit images on garden themes, and designers interpret poems, essays and stories in plant material, pairing the region’s writers and artists with its florists in displays that reward a second look.
The Blooming Cuisine program highlights food preparation and kitchen design using fresh vegetables, herbs and flowers, and visitors can grab a bite at the on-site Garden Cafe. The cooking demonstrations tie the festival to the region’s growing interest in edible landscaping and farmers-market cooking, showing audiences how a kitchen garden looks, grows and tastes.
The Mobile Museum of Art also runs a weekend program with activities for children of all ages, extending the festival’s reach to the youngest visitors. The museum’s participation reflects the event’s broad coalition of community partners, and the children’s programming gives families a reason to make the festival a full-day outing rather than an hour’s stroll.
A Mobile spring tradition
The Festival of Flowers has become a fixture on the Mobile area’s spring calendar, drawing garden enthusiasts and families from across the region each year. Its March dates fall in the heart of azalea season, when Mobile’s gardens are at their showiest and the city’s reputation as the Azalea City is on full display, making a visit to the festival a natural extension of the season.
Seventeen years is a long run for any event, and the festival’s longevity owes to the machinery behind it: a hospital foundation with a mission, a volunteer corps that builds the gardens exhibit by exhibit, and a theme that forces the show to reinvent itself annually. Each winter, designers begin interpreting the new theme long before the first tent pole goes up in March.
The economic ripple is considerable as well. Visitors who come for the festival fill hotels, restaurants and shops across Mobile, and the Southeast Tourism Society’s Top 20 designation helps market the event to travelers well beyond the Gulf Coast. For a hospital foundation, that tourism multiplier means the event’s community value extends well past the funds it raises on its own grounds.
Planning a visit
More information on hours, tickets and the full schedule of exhibits is available through Providence Hospital Foundation ahead of the March 25-28 event. Organizers encourage visitors to plan for more than one pass through the grounds — the 300,000 square feet of exhibits, the demonstration schedule and the vendor areas rarely fit into a single visit.
Gardeners are advised to bring questions for the Master Gardeners, lists for the vendor aisles and comfortable shoes for the tents. Families will find the children’s activities concentrated on the weekend, when the Mobile Museum of Art’s program runs alongside the main exhibits. Photographers can enter the World of Photography contest through the festival’s submission process, and design enthusiasts will want time with the Floral Couture mannequins and the windmill garden that anchors the international tour.
For seventeen years the festival has proven that a hospital foundation, a tent field and a few thousand volunteers’ hours can build one of the Gulf Coast’s most beloved traditions. The 2010 edition — from England to Holland to Asia under one canvas roof, with couture made of petals and cuisine from the garden — aims to prove it again, March 25 through 28, on the Providence Hospital campus in Mobile.
How the festival grew to 300,000 square feet
The festival’s growth from a modest fundraiser to a 300,000-square-foot showcase did not happen by accident. Each year’s organizing committee builds on the last, expanding exhibit categories, recruiting new designers and adding programming that draws different audiences — the photography contest for artists, the cooking demonstrations for food enthusiasts, the children’s activities for families and the vendor marketplace for shoppers.
The tent architecture itself is part of the show’s identity. Unlike a convention hall, the festival’s temporary landscape lets designers build gardens with real soil, real trees and real water features, then dismantle them in days. Visitors walk on mulch paths between living exhibits, and the open-sky sections let the Gulf Coast’s late-March weather do what it does best — make everything bloom.
Behind the scenes, hundreds of volunteers from hospital auxiliaries, garden clubs and community organizations assemble the show. Designers begin constructing their displays in the days before opening, working from plans that interpret the year’s theme down to individual blooms. By the time the gates open on Thursday, the Providence Hospital campus has been remade.
Why the hospital builds a flower show
The pairing of a health care mission with a garden festival is more natural than it might first appear. Hospitals treat healing as their work, and the festival extends that idea to the community — gardens, research has repeatedly suggested, contribute to well-being, and an event that gets families walking, learning and eating well sits comfortably beside a hospital’s public health goals.
The Foundation’s proceeds support the hospital’s service mission in the Mobile community, and the festival doubles as a visibility campaign for that work. Sponsors, vendors and attendees all become stakeholders in Providence’s mission, and the event’s longevity has made it one of the foundation’s most reliable and recognizable fundraisers.
The community coalition the festival assembles each year — the Mobile Museum of Art, Master Gardeners, regional photographers and writers, and florists and designers from across the Gulf Coast — is itself an asset that outlasts the four-day run. Partnerships forged over a windmill garden and a floral couture gown carry into the community’s civic life long after the tents come down.
What visitors will find on the grounds
A first-time visitor’s route through the festival reads like a world tour with stops at home. The international gardens transport walkers from an English country landscape through Holland’s windmill scene to Asian-inspired plantings, each built to the standard of a botanical garden exhibit rather than a fair display. The Garden-scape area showcases floral design as an art form, with artist in residence Sarah Haas demonstrating what the craft can do at its highest level.
The Floral Couture gallery offers the show’s most photographed moments, with mannequins dressed entirely in plant material. Nearby, the Seeds of Wisdom displays pair the words of local writers with interpretations in flowers, and the World of Photography walls line the walkways with images submitted by the community.
The shopping aisles — Gardener’s Galleria art and goods, plus the gear and equipment area — tempt visitors with items to carry home, while the Blooming Cuisine stage sends them home hungry for their own kitchen gardens. The Garden Cafe keeps everyone fueled without leaving the grounds, and the children’s weekend activities keep young visitors engaged between gardens.
It is that breadth — world gardens and local writers, couture and cooking, art and equipment — that has kept the festival on the Southeast Tourism Society’s Top 20 list for more than a decade and kept Mobile families returning each March. The 17th annual edition, March 25-28, 2010, stands ready to earn the tradition all over again.