The PHS Philadelphia Flower Show is the nation’s largest and longest-running horticultural event and fundraiser featuring stunning displays by the world’s premier floral, garden, and landscape designers. The 2025 Philadelphia Flower Show will begin on March 1 and continue through the 9th.
This year’s exhibits will take you into a new world of imaginative designs and boundless inspiration. The theme, Gardens of Tomorrow, invites you to explore the future through the eyes of visionary designers, expert gardeners, and passionate green enthusiasts as they merge nature’s brilliance with human ingenuity.
What is meaningful to Lakeside is that our Lakeside School students have their own display that is designed, created and built by our own staff and students. Each year our students from a very small alternative school compete with other institutions in our region where thousands of attendees to the show can walk through our dynamic display while our students share all the work that has been done over many months to create this award-winning exhibit.
This is a process that has been developed over months of work. Our greenhouse staff and students work diligently to design and build the entire display in our greenhouse at our Horsham Campus. They work on all the details of the structure, the flora, the technical aspects, the artistic aspects and how it can be dismantled and rebuilt at the Flower Show.
This week, all the details of resetting the display emerge. Pallets of stone, all the building materials, the plants and all the small details are loaded into trucks. The drivers carefully haul all of the materials down to the Pennsylvania Convention Center. The materials are then loaded into the display area and the work begins to rebuild the display.
Our students are transported each day of the week to complete the construction process. They place the stone parameters, build the structures, plant the flowers, set up the technology utilized and work through the challenges that reflect the precision and artistry of the display. It is laborious and tiresome work while other displayers around them are doing the same. Their time is limited as the first judging session is Friday of this week.
Once the display is finished and the show begins, their work is not done. Our students are responsible to describe their display to the visiting public. They build relationships and inform the attendees to the show how it was built and how the details are put together. It is an experience that tests their skill, their work ethic and their relational skills. They typically rise to meet all of the challenges they face. It is impressive that a group of middle school and high school students can create such a beautiful display in a week, win medals and be an affirmed part of the largest international flower show in the world. We are always proud of their many efforts. They gain such valuable and life-changing experiences from it all which bring them great affirmation and confidence.
If you are able to attend the Philadelphia Flower Show, please stop by the Lakeside School display. I think you will enjoy it. Also, you can see the display on the coverage of The Flower Show by 6ABC at 7:00 p.m. on Saturday, March 1. It is an impressive event that Lakeside is proud to be a part of.
Gerry Vassar
President/CEO
