While winter still reigns outside and snowdrops are hesitantly raising their heads, spring has already arrived in Frankfurt's Palmengarten. Since Thursday, a spring landscape has been unfolding in the gallery at the Palm House, guiding visitors through a dense sea of colours and scents until 22 February. Thousands of tulips, daffodils, hyacinths and irises form the centrepiece of this year's spring flower show. A botanical preview of the coming season.
What appears to be a spontaneous awakening here is the result of months of preparation. Since last autumn, the Palmengarten's team of gardeners has cultivated around 55,000 flower bulbs, simulating winter for them in cold storage and then gently acclimatising them to rising temperatures. It was not until January that the blackout was removed so that the plants could sprout in time for the exhibition. The early bloomers are arranged in a carefully composed landscape: a willow arbour, a small water basin and decorative shrubs frame the flowering plants. The ensemble is complemented by trees and shrubs that have not been seen in this form in recent years. These include red witch hazel, laurel-leaved snowballs with reddish buds, weeping birches, ornamental apples and the characteristically twisted corkscrew hazel.
For Palmengarten director Katja Heubach, the show is more than an aesthetic promise of warmer days. She also sees it as an invitation to sharpen our awareness of nature outside the greenhouses. Many of the early bloomers on display will continue to be cultivated outdoors after the exhibition ends, thus enriching the garden's plant population in the long term.
An accompanying information concept provides guidance: information boards explain where and at what time early bloomers can be particularly well spotted in the Palmengarten. They are aimed at visitors who not only want to see the botanical spring, but also want to understand it. The Palmengarten is open daily from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. during the spring flower show. Anyone who walks through the gallery during these weeks will leave with the impression that winter, at least under glass, has already begun to retreat.
