Landscape Architecture and Horticulture students in the Tyler School of Art and Architecture are taking visitors to the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s 2026 Philadelphia Flower Show on a journey to the past, it’s influence on the present and how we can help preserve tomorrow, exploring “botanical migration” and how “our traditions are a product of our intergenerational relationship to place and to one another.”
“We are rooted in our regional landscapes and collective cultural exchange. Upon arrival in the 17th century, people encountered our ‘sylvania’ with fresh eyes. Those who embraced uncertainty and curiosity fought against their fears with open minds and learned from native neighbors in order to survive. Plants that fed our foodways were traded by native peoples across continents and brought by immigrants across oceans. Importation and exchange transferred collections and scientific knowledge.”
Students in the Landscape Architecture Design-Build Studio and Tyler School of Art and Architecture Greenhouse Education and Research Complex have spent months taking their vision of botanical migration from design concept to built reality.
Temple’s exhibit, CommonWealth: Nourishing Community and Our Natural World, will be presented at the Philadelphia Flower Show from Saturday, February 28, through Sunday, March 8 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.
“The theme of this year’s Flower Show is ‘Rooted’ and exhibitors were challenged to understand and reflect upon the roots of horticulture and American Gardening — we know many of those roots grew right here in the Philadelphia area,” said Michael LoFurno, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture who is guiding the students through the design-build process with Kate Benisek, Associate Professor of Instruction and Program Head of Landscape Architecture and Horticulture. “Each of the educational exhibits were additionally charged with reflecting on an individual or group that gave them a start in horticulture or an impetus to study plants, work with plants, design with plants. In order to do that, we looked at a whole lot of people who have come before us in American gardening.”
For Temple’s exhibit, LoFurno said, their research led them to “one of the very first and what is now the oldest botanical garden in America, which was started by John and William Bartram.”
“Our exhibit is called CommonWealth. We wanted to bring those two ideas together along with thinking about not just the wealth that we get when we grow things and the abundance that comes with that but also what we share in common as a community, which happens to be a commonwealth,” he said. “It made sense for us to go back to those early roots with William Penn and the founding of Pennsylvania, tracing our exhibit’s roots all the way back to the 1600s.”
According to Benisek, the work of father and son team John and William Bartram provides a key inspiration for the 2026 exhibit. The Bartram’s observations and collections of native plants form the root of plant science in the United States.
“It was very important work; it was the work of two people that came to a new place and were overwhelmed by its beauty and the ways in which it was distinct from where they had come from previously, which was England,” she said. “The interest that we have in the legacy of the Bartrams is very much alive today through Bartram’s Garden, which is a wonderfully wild botanical garden right in Philadelphia, that is a living legacy to two individuals, but a legacy that is so much more, which is presented through the history that the garden keeps alive.”
The rich story of Bartram’s Garden, Benisek said, is not only historical “it is cultural.”
“It involves all of the people who supported the work of the Bartrams,” she said. “Bartram’s Garden is an urban agricultural community rooted in the experience of the African Diaspora that honors history and healing and offers public recreation and respite.”
One of the goals of Temple’s 2026 exhibit, according to Landscape Architecture junior Lindsay Slusser, “is to show how culture and ecology and plants all shape the landscapes that we live in.”
“I hope that visitors get out of our exhibit just a sense of wonder, that they get the feeling of walking through these landscape areas without signage — pure discovery. There might be a sense of whimsy, but there is also historical significance — the tale of Philadelphia and the landscapes that shaped the region,” she said. “There is a strong focus on culture, of the areas that we inhabit now from a time before the settlers arrived here. We’re exploring how those early groups coexisted together and brought practices from all over the world here to shape our local landscape, influencing what is here today.”
From Concept to Construction
Temple University Ambler has a long and rich history with the Philadelphia Flower Show dating back to 1916 and Temple Ambler's predecessor, the Pennsylvania School of Horticulture for Women (PHSW). The Tyler School of Art and Architecture's Landscape Architecture and Horticulture programs, Temple University Ambler, and the Ambler Arboretum have taken home nearly 100 awards throughout that history in competition with other schools, design firms and public agencies.
While each year’s exhibit reflects Temple’s and the Landscape Architecture and Horticulture programs’ overarching sustainable and environmental mission, each exhibit places the creativity of the students and faculty working on the project in a given year on full display — every year is a unique vision presented to an appreciative international audience of several hundred thousand visitors.
The student team for the 2026 exhibit includes Landscape Architecture students Jennifer Castro, Maeva Dawson, Riley Deile, Jack Getz, Stephanie Haynesworth, Helen Jara-Castro, Sydney Johnson, Lara Makdsi and Lindsay Slusser.
Horticulture students Jane Lally, Sophia Lentz and Nicholas Schultz and Landscape Architecture student Ryan Frazier are working with Benjamin Snyder, Manager of the Tyler School of Art and Architecture Greenhouse Education and Research Complex, preparing 1,271 individual plants representing 99 different taxa for the exhibit. Read more about how the plants are readied for the exhibit here.
“Developing the design for the exhibit started with determining and coming to an agreement about what ‘Rooted’ meant to us personally and how we could relate it back to where we live. Worked together to figure out how to communicate that through as much symbolism, built structures and plants as possible,” said Landscape Architecture junior Maeva Dawson. “We want to teach people stewardship and the how rich the botanical history of Philadelphia is.”
Earlier in the design process, Dawson said, “I came up with this concept of using pots or as an homage to the people who I felt were really important to Philadelphia’s history — indigenous people, African Americans, as well as European settlers.”
“For the pots, I chose something related to the different cultures or things that benefited Philadelphia botanically and encapsulated that in a pot orf a vessel,” she said. “I think one of the things I’ve learned the most about while working on this exhibit is teamwork and good communication skills and being able to effectively convey ideas and concepts.”
According to LoFurno, for many of the students, “this might be the first time they’ve ever used a staple gun let alone a rotary saw or a drill bit.”
“Having this hands-on experience gives them an appreciation for when they go out professionally of the craftsmen that are involved when building these landscapes,” he said. “Some of the students in our class have worked in design and construction and they are honing their skills through this experience, learning to become better designers, learning how to become better nursery people, as they mature through the program.”
Rocky Runs, Riparian Refuges and Wandering Wattles
According to Benisek, the 2026 exhibit includes several areas dedicated to specific themes, such as the Vibrant Glade, Path of Discovery, Grow and Stow, Riparian Refuge, Bountiful Orchard and Wandering Wattle.
“We really want to highlight the geography of our region and the fact that we are in a truly interesting place. We are located where the Atlantic Coastal Plain is meeting the Piedmont; so there is this idea of a fall line, which is where all of our major cities in the region are located,” she said. “We really wanted to build up to the topography and the heights of that Piedmont region and work our way all the way down to the riparian conditions that one would find along the Schuylkill River adjacent to Bartram’s Garden.”
According to Landscape Architecture junior Helen Jara-Castro, her team of three is focused on “some of the more structural aspects of the exhibit.”
“We’re working on a food forest, the barn, the overhead structure and the silo. I want people to be captivated by our exhibit and explore the possibilities of creating some of these design concepts and using some of these plants at home,” she said. “Something that makes Temple’s Landscape Architecture program unique is our involvement in the Philadelphia Flower Show in addition to the other hands-on community projects that we are involved with, which is something that drew me to the program. There are complications that can happening when working on a design-build project like this; this is a great learning space to explore what you can and can’t do and collaboratively find solutions to any problems that arise.”
Landscape Architecture junior Lara Makdsi’s team is working on some of the “more naturalized parts of the exhibit.”
“We’re working on the Wandering Wattle (a fence-like structure made of woven willow branches), the riparian meadow and a little muskrat pool. I think I’m most excited about the story the exhibit tells — as you walk around the exhibit there are different areas that highlight different parts of our history, which I think is really beautiful,” she said. “I hope that visitors leave feeling more connected to Philadelphia and the history of the land they’re standing on.”
The Rocky Run and the precipice have been the focus of Slusser and her team in addition to the Vibrant Glade.
“Our section takes us from the fall line down to a riparian-type area — it’s the story of that fall line moving downward,” she said. “Temple’s Landscape Architecture program has a strong focus on ecology and sustainability. Being part of creating the Flower Show exhibit each year is a big part of that — we get that design-build, hands-on aspect that I believe a lot of programs don’t have.”
A Hands-on Experience Showcasing “An Ethic of Conservation”
Temple’s program is one of less than a handful of accredited programs in the nation that include a mandatory design-build experience. The hands-on aspect of the Flower Show project and the emphasis on design-build throughout Tyler’s Landscape Architecture program, “really lets us as students conceptualize what we’re designing,” said Makdsi.
“Through design-build, we gain a greater understanding of how a design works, the mechanisms behind it and how the design would be implemented in the real world,” she said. “Our exhibit being part of the Flower Show this year is really exciting to me; that other people will get to experience the months of dedication my classmates and I have put into this. It’s good to know that other people will see and experience your work.”
The students that pursue Temple’s Landscape Architecture programs come from a diversity of backgrounds and experiences, LoFurno said.
“Some of them have an artistic bent while others have a horticultural bent. Some of them have never designed anything before so when they are working with actual building materials they have a chance to experiment and see how things are manufactured,” he said. “Handling the materials, I think, is an invaluable experience for our students. We look a lot at sustainability in our program, so we reuse a lot of our materials — we don’t want to waste anything.”
Stewardship and “practicing thrift and embracing abundance” are key elements to Temple’s exhibit as a whole, Benisek said.
“Our exhibit highlights the idea of collecting and acknowledging abundance but also being thrifty, encouraging preservation and encouraging conservation of our natural resources. Real wealth comes from the natural resources that provide us with food, with shelter, with fuel,” she said. “There were so many different threads that came together here in southeastern Pennsylvania to make the abundance that was found in this region possible. Cultural traditions, foodways from across oceans, foodways from across North America, all of those things came together to allow us to approach that bounty with a certain amount of thrift in mind.”
Benisek said she hopes visitors to Temple’s exhibit “look a little bit closer at what we are trying to illustrate.”
“Engagement and the crossing of a variety of cultures, whether it is Native American culture, settler/colonial culture, Black American culture, are critically important to our history and are also critically important to our engagement today,” she said.
For more information about the Tyler School of Art and Architecture Landscape Architecture and Horticulture programs, visit https://tyler.temple.edu/programs/landscape-architecture-horticulture.
For more information about Temple University Ambler, visit https://ambler.temple.edu.