Water-saving beauties at Flower Show

Mention the Philadelphia Flower Show and here's what often comes to mind: big waves of colorful flowers, expensive exhibits, and gardens you can only dream of in your own backyard.

That voyeuristic, fantasy-inspiring quality of the show, which runs through Sunday at the Convention Center, is part of the draw. But not everything on display is so overwhelming.

You can easily miss quieter exhibits by the North American Rock Garden Society and the Philadelphia Water Department. Now before you stop reading, remember that some of life's coolest lessons are like these exhibits - big ideas that start small and simple.

Same with gardening.

The big idea here is to save water however you can. And though rock gardeners and a municipal water department may seem odd flower-bedfellows, they're of one mind: An easy way to conserve is to plant stuff that doesn't need a lot of water in the first place.

Sedum and Delosperma cooperi, or hardy ice plant, for example. They're perfect together, both tough succulents that tolerate drought by storing water in their chubby leaves, stems and roots.

"They're very eco-friendly," says Walt Cullerton of Pineville, Bucks County, part of the North American Rock Garden Society's Delaware Valley chapter. "They like to live the way nature set them up - in the mountains, with cold winds and limited moisture, in very harsh conditions."

Such conditions prepare them for taking root on an energy-saving green roof, like the one the Water Department built at the Flower Show. Or in a city or suburban garden, like the one in the Rock Garden Society's exhibit.

Rock gardeners love low-growing or miniature plants, mostly perennials, such as ajuga, sempervivum (hens 'n chicks), saxifrage, woodland anemone, hellebore and dwarf shrubs and conifers.

"The true rock gardener gets really excited," Cullerton muses, "when he sees a half-inch bloom on a one-inch plant somewhere above the tree line in Colorado or Afghanistan, growing out of rocks.

"They're very serious people," he says.

Dick van Duzer of Pipersville uses spring bulbs in his rock garden, things like tiny snowdrops, miniature iris and narcissus. He's a fan, too, of native heuchera and hardy cyclamen, excellent water-conserving groundcovers for any garden.

And that's the point, partly, says the Water Department's Arthur Holst, who coordinated its green-roof exhibit at the Flower Show.

"Just because these plants are on a green roof doesn't mean you can't put them in ground. In fact, they'd be great there," he says.

But gardeners, in their minds and yards, often segregate plants into categories: perennials and annuals, trees and shrubs, natives and exotics. Who puts succulents and traditional perennials, rock garden/green roof/backyard garden in the same mental - or green - space?

Joe Lamp'l does.

In The Green Gardener's Guide, published last month by Cool Springs Press, the TV garden guy argues that the nation's 90 million gardening households have an urgent responsibility not just to save water, but to stop wasting it.

"We know we overwater and we waste a lot of water, and that it not only goes into our landscape and washes across it, it takes contaminants and sediment and pollutes our water even more," says Lamp'l by phone this week while touring Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square. He's here for the Flower Show, where he'll be speaking Sunday.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the average American uses 100 gallons of water a day, between 20 and 50 percent of it for gardens and lawns, and half of all of it is wasted.

"That is unbelievable," says Lamp'l, who lives in Mount Airy, N.C., and calls himself "Joe Gardener."

Like the friends he never knew he had in the Philadelphia Water Department and the Delaware Valley Rock Garden Society, he advocates smart plant choices as a way to save water.

"A good rule of thumb is to look toward your native plants and native grasses, which are highly ornamental and offer a nice contrast and adapt far more readily to conditions where you don't have to provide water," he says.

The ornamental issue comes up in many discussions of rock gardens, says 30-year rock gardener Jane Grushow of Ephrata, who was staffing the Flower Show exhibit this week.

"People say these plants aren't very colorful, and it's true, they do tend to explode in spring and then go green," she says, "but you need to add things to get color all season."

These water-savers tend to come in shades of green with tiny pink, white or yellow flowers and the occasional rosy blush. For some gardeners, that's plenty, especially when combined with the plants' extraordinary shapes - rosettes, stars, spikes and feathers.

And talk about interesting scale.

"I'm impressed by big perennial borders, but I find this kind of gardening more intimate," says van Duzer. "It's an opportunity to display your artistic creativity."

So if you're weary of "green" and "sustainable," buzz words used to promote everything from cars to underwear, head where the plants are low and delicate, subtle and dry.

Then consider yourself ahead of the curve.

The Philadelphia Flower Show continues through Sunday at the Convention Center, 12th and Arch Streets. Proceeds from the show, produced by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, benefit Philadelphia Green, the society's urban-greening program.

Hours: 10 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. today; 8 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. tomorrow; 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday. Box office closes one hour before the show ends each day.

Admission: Box-office prices for adults are $26 tomorrow and Sunday, $24 today, and $13 for children ages 2 to 16. The show offers a family fun pack, $65 for two adults and two children under 16. Advance tickets are $22 for adults, $21.50 for groups of 25 or more, and $13 for children 2 to 16. Visitors who get their hands stamped can leave and reenter the same day without paying a readmission fee.

Where to buy tickets: SEPTA ticket outlets, AAA Mid-Atlantic, Acme Markets, Clemens Family Markets, Philadelphia-area Borders Books & Music stores, select PNC Bank branches, local nurseries and florists, and online at www.theflowershow.com.

Information: 215-988-8899.

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Joe Lamp'l, TV gardener and author of The Green Gardener's Guide: Simple, Significant Actions to Protect & Preserve Our Planet (Cool Springs Press, $16.95), will speak at the Flower Show from 2 to 3:30 p.m. Sunday in the Convention Center's Lecture Room 201-C.

The show's Philadelphia Water Department and North American Rock Garden Society exhibits are located in the front of the Know It section, which is to the left as you enter the Convention Center hall.

For information about the Delaware Valley chapter of the North American Rock Garden Society, go to http://www.dvcnargs.org/.

To learn more about green roofs, go to the Penn State Center for Green Roof Research Web site: http://hortweb.cas.psu.edu/research/greenroofcenter/.

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Read Virginia Smith's blogs from the Flower Show at http://go.philly.com/kisstheearth.EndText