Philadelphia Flower Show - Brain Forest

This is another of the major commercial displays, and it is one of my two favorites from this year's show. It was created by Jennifer Designs of New Jersey and also called Cerebral Garden. Of course the one part you could see from almost anywhere in the room was the stark white tree above some sort of convoluted base.

As you approached, you realized that there were flower beds all around the bottom of the white... sausages? intestines? brain!

Whatever it was, you could walk inside it, like entering a cave underneath the roots of the tree.

There you learned that the display was playing on the idea of an "electric garden of the mind." There were interpretive panels that explained the different parts of the brain. You could push buttons to hear about how the brain uses electrical signals to create thought. The rope lights represent neural pathways.

Inside, there were a lot more of those (manzanita? see- I remembered that from yesterday) branches that look like electric arcs painted white.

There were even white fingers of "electricity" painted on the floor. I like this attention to detail.

Throughout, the frothy floral material seemed to suggest brain matter.

And they left the roof open right under the tree so you could look straight up through the roots to the tree itself.

This display also won one of the special recognition awards from the Federated Garden Clubs of Pennsylvania.

I managed to be super-productive today, which is good, because not much will happen for the next three days while I'm at the Women's Expo in Grand Rapids. Of course, I hope to sell a lot of books, and that is a good thing too. But the projects will suffer.

I'm not sure I learned much. Well, yes, I learned how to use a spreadsheet to help create a good master plan to design a database. That works much better than just sketching things on scrap paper, but I hadn't thought of it. It's part of the video series about Access that I've joined.

See PFS- Lightning Strike