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The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society was thinking about America’s 250th birthday when it devised the theme of the annual Philadelphia Flower Show, “Rooted: Origins of American Gardening,” opening this weekend at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.

Many of the show’s designers gave a personal interpretation, rather than a national idea of American roots.

“I think a good theme functions both at that high-abstract level as well as personally relevant,” said Seth Pearsoll, the show’s creative director. “Some folks are doing a slight nod at the 250, and others were looking at: ‘This is who I am. This is where I come from.’”

One of the featured designers is Robertson’s Flowers, a landmark Chestnut Hill florist that has been a family business for a century. It first opened in 1927 and has been in the same location on Germantown Avenue since 1951.

“It’s one of my favorite things when someone comes in and says, ‘You did my mother’s wedding and my grandmother’s wedding!’ said owner Taylor Ferry, the great, great grandson of founder George Robertson. “We are rooted in our community.”

Ferry’s display is a recreation of Robertson’s longtime corner shop at Germantown and Highland avenues. Each window features a period floral display particular to certain decades over the last century.

“It has changed a lot,” said Ferry about the 100-year sweep of floral styles. “What’s available now is anything. What was available back then was not. You had to use what you could get.”

This year’s show

The centerpiece entrance display, designed by the Philadelphia Flower Show,  accentuates roots with a fantasy display of a forest floor. Its flower beds are structured with large rocks and logs, and a copse of birch trees is just stripped trunks with no canopy, as though seen by a forest wanderer keeping their gaze turned downward to the ground.

Soaring overhead is, ironically, a root structure. It forms an arch made from woven branches and flowers.

“We wanted it to feel otherworldly,” Pearsoll said. “It’s half-Japanese garden, half-forest floor in Scotland, and we meet somewhere in the middle.”

Jennifer Reed of Jennifer Designs in Mullica Hill, New Jersey, plays with flowers rooted in literature with a full-sized mock-up of London’s old Globe Theatre, where many of William Shakespeare’s plays premiered. Shakespeare’s writing is covered with flowers. The rose, alone, is mentioned over 100 times in his poems and plays.

Reed’s display is a play. At random times during the flower show, a curtain will drop over the stage as the floral figures and props are rearranged through three narrative scenes. They loosely tell the story of “Romeo and Juliet” played out by a sunflower and a rose, lovers from opposite sides of a flower field.

The story was written by Reed’s daughter, Chloe Oechsle, 17. The full text is available for download on the Jennifer Designs website.

“It’s very nerve-racking,” Oechsle said. “But I’m glad for the opportunity to help my mom out like this.”

True to Shakespeare, Oechsle’s tale of star-crossed lovers, or in this case, flowers, is a tragedy, which Reed had concerns about.

“I thought it was in bad taste to have a sunflower and a rose carcass on the ground,” she said. “There was a long discussion on how to do that. So now we’re kind of alluding to it.”

The Philadelphia Flower Show reserved a particular spot of the Convention Center floor to drill down into the nation’s semiquincentennial. The American Landscape Showcase is a quad of four displays that reference the history of American gardening.

One of them is a simple, decorative fenced meadow with a bird bath under a trellis. But the whole scene is dilapidated; the garden gate has a broken hinge, the meadow is overgrown and there’s a “For Sale” sign posted. The whole unkempt tableau is overtaken by native plants.

“The patina of time has started to creep in a little bit,” designer Kelly Norris said. “Something that might have once been very cultivated has now started to take on a more authentic character of what it’s like when plants are allowed to live with the realities of place.”

Norris said his landscape design can be read metaphorically into the history of American gardening, whose trends were sometimes nativist reactions to formal European styles.

“Kelly is a phenomenal gardener,” Pearsoll said. “He takes very complicated things and makes them read beautifully.”

The Philadelphia Flower Show opens Saturday, Feb. 28, and runs through March 8.