Gardeners Will “Jazz It Up” at the 2006 Nashville Lawn & Garden Show

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – “Jazz It Up – Can You Dig It?” is the theme for the 2006 Nashville Lawn & Garden Show set for March 2 through 5, at the Tennessee State Fairgrounds. The popular annual event, the largest gardening show in Tennessee, attracted more than 24,000 people from throughout the mid-south region in 2005.

Highlights of the four-day event include an acre display of live gardens, 250 exhibit booths of horticultural products, services and equipment for show and sale, a floral design gallery, and a free lecture series on a variety of horticulture and gardening topics. Among the featured speakers at the 2006 show will be Julie Moir Messervy, one of the nation’s foremost landscape designers, and R. William (Bill) Thomas, executive director and head gardener of Chanticleer, a 35 acre garden near Philadelphia that has been described as one of the most diverse and beautiful public gardens in the United States.

“No garden is ever complete; there is always room for improvement and ways to ‘jazz it up,’” said Randall Lantz, co-manager of the event. “The 2006 show will spotlight the variety of ways to introduce some ‘jazz’ into gardening, whether it is by plant selection, construction elements, lighting or new horticultural products. The phrase ‘dig it’ will take on a whole new meaning for gardeners after the 2006 Nashville Lawn & Garden Show.”       

Messervy, who received the American Horticultural Society’s 2005 Great American Gardeners Award for Landscape Design, will speak Saturday, March 4 about the Toronto Music Garden, a three-acre public park based on J.S. Bach’s “First Suite for Unaccompanied Cello,” which she created in collaboration with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the City of Toronto. On March 5, she will lecture on Creating the Landscape of Home, a discussion of how to remove traditional barriers between the home and its surroundings to produce a unified design. Bill Thomas will speak on March 2, to provide an insider’s look at Chanticleer, a relatively young garden that was one of the first to incorporate lush tropicals outdoors mixed with hardy plants, emphasizing foliage color and texture, rather than flowers. 

The Nashville Lawn & Garden Show is popular with amateur horticulturists and gardeners because it is a hands-on, information-gathering event. The creative garden displays and the one-stop-shopping opportunities for garden enthusiasts have made the show one of the largest annual events of any kind presented in Nashville. All garden displays and exhibit booths are located indoors at the Tennessee State Fairgrounds, where there is ample free parking. The show is produced by the Horticultural Association of Tennessee (HAT), which uses the proceeds to benefit Tennessee horticulture projects statewide.

For information on the 2006 Nashville Lawn & Garden Show telephone 615/876-7680 or visit www.nashvillelawnandgardenshow.com.