New England Flower Show Folds after 137 Years

The city's annual antidote for late-winter blues has long been the gardens full of delphiniums, forsythia, and tulips adorning gazebos and topiaries set up at the New England Spring Flower Show.

But after 137 years of dazzling its frost-fatigued visitors, next year's show will not provide Bostonians the same bridge to spring, and the state risks losing millions of dollars in potential revenue as a result.

The show has been canceled, though its sponsors are hoping to stage two smaller events in 2009.

"This is a year of transition," said Betsy Ridge Madsen, president of the board of trustees of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, which in recent years has suffered a host of financial and management problems. "It's sad that we won't have the same scale, but we're trying to reinvent the show."

Madsen said that financial difficulties and the slowing economy have forced them to call off the show, which has recently been held in March at Bayside Expo Center and in previous years attracted more than 100,000 people from around the region.

Last year, the Horticultural Society lost money on the show. The society's $4 million budget was sorely taxed by $850,000 spent sprucing up the Rose Kennedy Greenway with shrubs and plants.

"There's no sense in doing it if we can't at least break even," she said. "This is an economic season in which not only are we having trouble to afford the show we did last year, but a lot of growers are feeling the pinch, as well."

In an effort to uphold the tradition, she said, the society plans to host the two smaller events, both of which remain in the planning phase.

The first, planned for March, would showcase plants and designs in the lobbies of several downtown hotels and office buildings. The second would exhibit plants, design, and landscaping and is scheduled for the summer at Elm Bank Reservation in Wellesley.

Patrick Moscaritolo, president of the Greater Boston Convention & Visitors Bureau, compared the annual flower show to traditions such as the Boston Marathon and Red Sox' opening day. He said the loss of the large event would be a blow to Boston.

"For many of us who have lived in Boston their whole lives, this is a big loss," Moscaritolo said. "It clearly drove business to restaurants and our hotels, not to mention money that helped the Bayside Expo Center."

Officials at the center did not return calls.

Moscaritolo said the flower show injects millions of dollars each year into the state's economy.

Julie Burns - director of the Mayor's Office of Arts, Tourism, and Special Events - said she hopes the society will bring back the gala event in future years.

"It certainly will be missed, and its absence will have a negative impact on the whole state," Burns said. "It's a longstanding Boston tradition that people look forward to from all over New England."

It has been a hard year for the society, which was founded in 1829.

It has had to borrow heavily to pay its bills, money-raising has dried up, and the board of trustees struggled with revelations that Bob Feige, the society's new executive director, had spent three days in jail during 2007 for failing to pay former employees of a business he once owned.

Feige resigned over the summer, and since then the society has frozen its business accounts and payments to creditors, changed its board, and fired 18 of its 30 staff members, including the woman who has run the flower show for the past 12 years.

The society's financial problems surfaced in 2002, when it was forced to sell $5.25 million in rare books and prints just to make ends meet. To do so, the state attorney general's office had to petition the Supreme Judicial Court for permission on its behalf. But the society's financial woes only worsened.

Donations slackened, and the society failed to build its planned "Garden Under Glass" as a showpiece of the Greenway. It instead installed flowers and landscaping on three open-air parcels.

In an Internal Revenue Service filing for the year ending Sept. 30, 2006, the society listed revenues of $4.1 million and expenses of nearly $4.3 million, including $1.91 million spent on that year's flower show, listed as a "nine-day exhibition attracting over 120,000 visitors." The show generated $1.99 million in revenue, according to the report.

Madsen said the society's new board is looking at new ideas to liven up the coming shows.

"I think it's a little premature for sadness," she said. "It won't be the same, but hopefully people will find it invigorating."