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In designer Bill Schaffer’s garden of the future, gravity is not as reliable as it is today.

In the botanical environment he designed for the Philadelphia Flower Show, trees float above black and neon skyscrapers while poisonous gloriosa climbing lilies choke steel and glass structures.

“Think ‘Blade Runner’ — the first movie — and ‘Avatar,’” he said. “It’s how nature meets mankind, how one is going to overtake the other, back and forth.”

“Gardens of the Future” is the theme of this year’s show, produced by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. Schaffer took the theme into a fantasy realm propelled by his own taste for dystopian fiction.

“I mean, I basically married my wife because she knew all the words to ‘Star Wars,’” he said. “Like, literally every word.”

Other designers invited to create floral and landscape displays in the Pennsylvania Convention Center are more down-to-earth.

Philadelphia’s Apiary Studio created a nostalgic landscape of tall grassy plants and clotheslines of white laundry crisscrossing each other in a gentle breeze. It approximates a garden seen from the perspective of a child, who is the future of gardening.

A few exhibitors took on the theme of horticulture as a gift to the next generation. Robertson’s Flowers and Events in Wyndmoor created an urban landscape centered by a gateway with mirrored silhouettes of a woman leading a child by hand.

Visitors see themselves reflected, pondering the Chinese proverb: “One generation plants the trees; another gets the shade.”

Rashawn Scarbo of Bloom Bold, Co. designed a floral arrangement around a deconstructed clock. She said it is a call to action, reminding visitors that time is always ticking into the future.

“When you think about the future of floral, you’ve got to figure out how you can sow into the youth who are our future, who will be taking our place,” said Scarbo, who teaches floral workshops in Philadelphia schools.

“People really go to some interesting places with the theme. I’ve had a lot of people look to the past to talk about the future,” said Flower Show vice president and creative director Seth Pearsoll. “Most of them make a very, very personal connection to the theme. That’s where a lot of the unexpected twists come into play.”

Jennifer Reed of Mullica Hill, New Jersey, took inspiration from her 14-year-old daughter to create the façade of a white house with a garden of pollinator plants in front. Behind is a dining room where giant insects and animals made of flowers are seated around a long table.

Reed’s “Welcoming Wildlife Home” was a crowd favorite at the Flower Show member preview event on Friday. She wanted to highlight animals that are beneficial to a garden ecosystem, inviting them inside to sit down to dinner together.

“We all need to get along, have a seat at the table and enjoy ourselves so we have a healthy community,” she said.

The animals are based on drawings by her daughter, hung as framed formal portraits.

“She entered an art contest where she had to draw something that had to do with something with the 4-H fair. She wanted to do a Mad Hatter tea party with all pollinators,” Reed said.

“Of course, I took my spin on it, but she’s like, ‘You have to tell everybody it was my idea,’” she said, adding dutifully: “The entire thing was her idea. I give credit to my daughter, Hannah.”

One of the exhibits was inspired by a story heard on National Public Radio in 2023 about a couple, Jonathan Yacko and Natalie Gilliard, who moved from New York City to rural Vermont in 2019 and almost immediately became socially isolated due to the COVID-19 pandemic. They planted over an acre of wildflowers, which wowed their neighbors and forged happy bonds between them.

Arrange, LLC of Haddonfield, N.J., created a facsimile of a wildflower meadow inside the Convention Center.

“The meadow proves that, sometimes, it’s the smallest actions that spark the most profound connections,” Arrange wrote in their exhibit statement.

The Philadelphia Flower Show will be on view until March 9.