For Benjamin Snyder, Manager of the Tyler School of Art and Architecture Greenhouse Education and Research Complex, and the dedicated team of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture students getting all of the plants ready for Temple’s 2026 Philadelphia Flower Show exhibit, it’s not just one big undertaking, it’s 1,271 individual projects.
Every plant and tree from 99 different taxa require specialized attention to ensure that they will be ready to put on their best show in front of hundreds of thousands of visitors at the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s Philadelphia Flower Show from Saturday, February 28, through Sunday, March 8, at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.
Temple’s exhibit, CommonWealth: Nourishing Community and Our Natural World, will highlight themes related to botanical migration and the influence and legacy of John and William Bartram whose observations and collections of native plants form the root of plant science in the United States. The exhibit explores “how we are rooted in our regional landscapes and collective cultural exchange. Our traditions are a product of our intergenerational relationship to place and to one another.”
“When selecting the plant palette to reflect the themes of this year’s exhibit, we were focusing mainly on native species but we’re also highlighting species that the Bartrams helped bring to this area through their plant trades with Europe and other regions. With Bartram’s Garden and William and John Bartram, they were exploring all sorts of native plants in our region while also working as a nursery for importing plants from foreign locations as well,” said Snyder, who is also a Temple Horticulture program alumnus. “They were a hub of botanical activity in our region. Our plant selection reflects that, including natural and non-native species in the plant palette.”
Having a direct hand in preparing the plants for the Flower Show “allows us to see the hard work that we’ve all put in and the expertise of our Greenhouse Manager Ben (Snyder) as well as everything that we’re learning put to real-world use,” said Landscape Architecture sophomore Ryan Frazier.
“Hands-on learning is a big benefit to me. It gives me a more in-depth look at what I’m doing when I’m designing landscapes — what the ecological effects of the plants I’m using are and how I can use that to benefit our communities,” he said. “Most of what I’m working on for the Flower Show is pest management, keeping things watered and also forcing plants. We work to keep them in the correct temperatures by moving them around between our Hoop House and Greenhouse to make sure that they flower or leaf out at the time of the show.”
Preparing the Plants for the Big Show
For the horticultural magic taking place in the Greenhouse — convincing plants that late February to early March is the perfect time to bloom — timing is everything, according to Horticulture senior Jane Lally.
“Moving all of these trees and shrubs back and forth depends on whether we are trying speed up their leaf out time or we’re trying to slow it down if they are flowering a bit too much,” she said. “When I’m working with a plant, I get to really know and understand that plant. I get to know what it needs, how often it might need to be watered, if it dries out really quickly, its lifecycle, it’s whole morphology really.”
For Lally, 2026’s exhibit is her second foray into preparing plants for the Flower Show having been part of the team that took 2025’s multiple award-winning Reflections on Regeneration: An Artful Response to Our Changing Environment from concept to reality.
“I tend to learn more in general when it involves hands-on learning. Temple offers a very valuable and diverse set of classes when it comes to the Horticulture major; a set of classes that I wasn’t able to find anywhere else,” she said. “It means a lot to me that our exhibit is part of the Flower Show — I think it is such a wonderful tradition that we have here at Temple Ambler. My hope is that visitors who experience our work get to appreciate our native plants a little bit more.”
Horticulture sophomore Nicholas Schultz agreed that the hands-on aspect of being part of the Flower Show team is a “really special” opportunity as a student.
“I’m a very visual learner and having hands-on experience just helps to reinforce that I feel,” he said. “It’s more interactive and I feel like that really helps some topics click.”
All of the Greenhouse plants “are sustainably grown,” according to Snyder.
“They are watered with rainwater — and recently with melted snow from the big storm — from our underground cisterns,” he said “We have not sprayed pesticides in this space in six years. We’re using bio-controls and natural enemies. Our visitors will be able to see that yes, you can grow these plants in a sustainable manner.”
Temple continues to be one of only a handful of exhibitors that force their own plants for their exhibits, Snyder said.
“For many of the native species that we are using in our exhibit, they require vernalization, or a cold dormancy period. Since we are trying to get them to flower earlier in the season than they normally would, we need to move their entire schedule up,” he said. “We actually use walk-in coolers to give them an artificial winter ahead of time and then bring them out depending on their schedule into the Greenhouse to give them light, heat and humidity to make them think it’s summertime.”
For larger plants, such as trees and shrubs, Snyder said, they go into plastic tents, “which you can see throughout our Greenhouse.”
“They are essentially mini greenhouses within the Greenhouse with even higher temperatures and higher humidities than our standard growing areas,” he said. “By being an exhibitor that grows all of our plants on site here at Temple University Ambler, we’re able to give our students hands-on experience working with a tight deadline, problem-solving, addressing issues as they arise with our crops and making sure everything is ready on Day Zero when we install our plants and everything is judged.”
Horticulture junior Sophia Lentz took the hands-on approach to cultivating plants for the exhibit to a whole other level as it required wading into one of the campus bogs to collect.
“One of the big things that I had to do on one of my first days working was dig out a bunch of skunk cabbage, which you can see featured in the exhibit. Working on the Flower Show provides a lot of new experiences like that — it’s a very unique project that allows me to have new opportunities in incorporating native plants into beautiful displays,” she said. “There’s a lot of up-potting (the process of moving a plant or seedling from its current container to a larger one) that needs to happen in order to get all of the plants’ root space accustomed to bigger spaces for when they go out into the exhibit on the Convention Center floor.”
Something that makes Temple’s Horticulture program unique, Lentz said, “is the close, tight-knit community it forms.”
“We have great teachers and professors that are always willing to accommodate you and all of your needs,” she said.
According to Snyder, the students working on the plants and trees, “have the opportunity to either do directed studies or explore volunteer opportunities to assist on the plant side of the Flower Show.”
“For our students, they get practical experience working with the plants in the Greenhouse,” he said. “This gives them the opportunity to plan ahead, try plant production and work on timing because we are trying to get these plants to either foliate or leaf out or flower for a very short window of time.”
In addition to Lally, Lentz, Frazier and Schultz, Snyder added, Landscape Architecture student volunteers Jennifer Castro, Helen Jara-Castro and Julianna Dubowski, and community volunteers Chandler McLaurin (a Landscape Architecture alumna) and Alan Zubrow have been invaluable to getting the plants and trees ready to be incorporated into the elements built by the Landscape Architecture students in the Junior Design-Build Studio.
New and Returning Plant Favorites
With exhibit areas such as the Rocky Run, Vibrant Glade, Riparian Refuge and Wandering Wattle, the design — conceived by Michael LoFurno, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture, and Kate Benisek, Associate Professor of Instruction and Program Head of Landscape Architecture and Horticulture, and the students of the Junior Design-Build Studio — the students in the Greenhouse have had ample opportunity to get hands-on with a wide variety of plants for the 2026 Flower Show exhibit.
Each year provides the opportunity to try new plants and plant combinations, Snyder said.
“Among the new plants we’re doing this year are gooseberries and currants. We do have native species but the plants that we are using are non-native, European species that were brought over by the early colonists and used as a food source making jams, jellies and preserves,” he said. “They also have very attractive fruit, which adds some ornamental aspects to your landscape as well.”
One of the highlights of Temple’s exhibits each year are the water features and the plants that call them home.
“We try to show how plants can clean water and stabilize stream banks. This year we will be incorporating some of our wetland plants, including Soft Rush (Juncus effusus), which is a native species that you can find growing along stream banks,” he said. “It’s actually in flower (in the Greenhouse) right now and has really cool hollow stems and small wind-pollinated flowers on the top.”
Another native species that will call the exhibit home, Snyder said, is Oakleaf hydrangea (Hydrangea quercifolia), “which we haven’t used in many years.”
“It’s great to see it back this year,” he said. “We’re growing it mainly for the foliage — it has these big oak-like leaves and exfoliating reddish peeling bark as it ages.”.
A returning favorite the Greenhouse team is calling on is the Ostrich Fern (Matteuccia struthiopteris), “which has been featured in at least the past eight exhibits.”
“The plants are dug up by our students from beds here on campus, used in the show and after the show they come back to campus, get replanted and possibly dug up again for future shows,” he said. “Some of the plants currently growing may have been part of award-winning exhibits at the Convention Center for four or five times now. Ferns make a great landscape plant, which is why we like to highlight them for our visitors — they are deer resistant and tolerate many different soil types, especially the Ostrich Fern, which are very vigorous.”
Snyder said he hopes the plant diversity within the exhibit inspires visitors to “try some of the things they see at their own property.”
“It could be within containers or in their own backyards,” he said. “Hopefully this is just the beginning, that it will inspire visitors to grow their own food, incorporate native species and in the process create beautiful natural habitat for wildlife and people to enjoy at the same time.”
Visit here more information about the Tyler School of Art and Architecture Landscape Architecture and Horticulture programs, visit https://tyler.temple.edu/programs/landscape-architecture-horticulture.
Visit here for more information about Temple University Ambler.