Art: Flower Show

Spring comes diffidently to great cities.

Thousands of tenement dwellers only know it by the softness of the air, the rows of overcoats in the pawnshops. Manhattan makes up for this yearly by beating the equinox with a display of such gorgeous flowers as never grew under open sky. Last week some two hundred thousand people paid $1 apiece to shuffle through the 19th International Flower Show, an exhibit that filled for the first time four full floors of the Grand Central Palace.

There was much of the usual magnificence. John P. Morgan's gardener, James S. Kelly, showed a wide border of giant tulips against a background of flowering dogwood. Mrs. Payne Whitney's Henning Michelsen built a brick-walled garden, gay with wisteria and flowering bulbs. Marshall Field's George Henry Gillies filled enough buckets with rare roses to bring his employer six different first prizes. Greenhousemen built a 60-ft. bank of flowering orchids like a chorus girl's dream of heaven. A million dollars' worth of blossoms and not a bug or a worm or a weed, but in this, the third year of the Depression, the International Flower Show took on a new seriousness.

In 1914, when the International Show began it was largely a commercial affair, organized by the Society of American Florists and Ornamental Horticulturists. Next year the Horticultural Society of New York and the New York Florists Club took it over. In 1922 the Garden Club of America came in; in 1927, the New York State Federation of Gardens. Proceeds from the show are dispensed a dozen ways. Some $40,000 is distributed in prizes. The Horticultural Society gives free exhibitions in its rooms and in the American Museum of Natural History while the Florists' Club has established a fund to provide traveling fellowships to study plant diseases. The Garden Club of America, and the various other groups associated with the show, use the Flower Show to further three campaigns that are gaining political importance: 1) the removal of billboards from highways; 2) roadside planting; 3) the teaching of conservation and nature study in public schools.

The last was the most emphasized at this year's show. A model schoolhouse was erected, complete with desks and elaborate exhibits made by nimble-fingered children. Each of the Manhattan apartment-dwellers who filed through the building was handed a little pamphlet warning him that to preserve the country's wild flowers he must never pick pink Lady's Slipper, Indian Moccasin, Liverleaf, Turk's-cap lily, Lady's Tresses, Rattlesnake Plantain. In moderation the Garden Club allows the picking of Grass of Parnassus, New Jersey Tea, Bluets, Clammy Azalea, Mad-Dog Skullcap and Virgin's Bower. If the urge to pick simply overpowers a city-dweller, the Garden Club begs him go for Blue-eyed grass. Bouncing Bet, Horse Mint, Daisy Fleabane, Devil's Bit, Lousewort and Viper's Bugloss. Violets, daisies and goldenrod are all right too.