Art Theme Picked For Flower Show

Art theme picked for flower show

This year’s Ann Arbor Flower and Garden Show, sponsored by the Matthaei Botanical Gardens, will have the theme “Art in Bloom.”

In a preview, the Botanical Gardens said this year’s show, the seventh, will focus on gardening as an art form and will explore ways gardeners and artists inspire one another. Attendance is expected to top 30,000. The show will be at the Washtenaw Farm Council Grounds.

This year’s 2,400-square-foot feature garden, “Monet’s Passion,” will be a blaze of color with climbing roses, iris, delphinium, poppies and spring bulbs, inspired by artist Claude Monet’s garden in Giverny, France. The garden will be built around a Grand Allee tunnel.

The exhibit will include arches with climbing roses, a walkway of nasturtiums, the facade of Monet’s “Pink House,” a pond with part of a Japanese bridge and a 60-foot mural, painted by retired U-M medical illustrator Bill Brudon in the style of Monet, depicting the Seine river and the landscape around Giverny.

In a series of “paint-box” flower beds, the feature garden will apply Monet’s color theory to plants, with hundreds of annuals and perennials for spring and summer. Flowering crab apple and cherry trees will line walkways. Weeping willows will hover over a reflective pond.

Other gardens, created by talented landscape designers using sculpture and floral arrangements, can be considered living studios of color and fragrance.

Garden and design experts will be available to offer tips for do-it-yourselfers. The show will feature more than 500 displays.

Advance tickets can be bought for $8 until March 27 at Kroger stores and at the Botanical Gardens. Tickets at the door will cost $9 for adults, $3 for children 4-12 and be free for kids three and under. Senior citizens will get a $1 discount at the door Thursday and Friday.