Plant Lovers Discovery Tours™ offers tours to coincide with the Philadelphia Flower Show, the world’s largest indoor flower show. Held every year the first week in March, the Flower Show is an experience not to be missed. Now you can enjoy the show and extend that experience with two customized garden tours—Revolutionary Gardens and Beyond and Horticultural Heroines.

Discover Philadelphia’s 300–year–long history as the gardening capital of North America with Plant Lovers Discovery Tours' expert gardeners as your tour leaders and our extensive historical background materials.

All Plant Lovers Discovery Tours™ for groups of 15 or more are customized to fit the group's travel plans and special interests. For a list of the gardens to choose from for our special Flower Show tours, please contact us at 610-543-1024 or info@plantloverstours.com.

Revolutionary Gardens and Beyond
In 1681, the English King Charles II thought a good solution to the rising number of Quakers in his realm would be to send them off to another land. He consequently made a very large and famous grant of North American land to one Quaker, William Penn, in settlement for a debt owed Penn’s father, who had been an admiral in the King's navy. The grant of 40,000 square miles was in a part of the new world that would come to be called Penn's Woods—Pennsylvania.

In turn Penn offered land in 100 acre parcels to Quakers and others wishing to come to the new world seeking religious freedom. In three years in the early 1680s more new settlers came to Pennsylvania than had come to New York in the previous 50 years. At one point in the migration, some 90 ships brought 7,000 people to Pennsylvania.

It was Williams Penn's vision of a Greene Countrie Town that led to Philadelphia's prominence in North American horticulture, a prominence that has lasted for over 300 years.

On the Revolutionary Gardens and Beyond tour you will see examples of the true colonial gardens—the gardens of necessity and the medicinal gardens that were critical to survival—and the emerging aesthetic gardens that reached their height in the Victorian pleasure gardens of the late 19^th century. We will guide you through beautiful gardens and majestic woodlands that started life as colonial farms and into the landscapes that served as Revolutionary War backdrops. You will also see what the early 20^th century construed to be gardens appropriate to the 18^th century but which we now call colonial revival gardens.

Horticultural Heroines
Women at the end of the 19^th century had few career options. For middle class women, the most common choices were teaching, nursing, and charity work. For working class women, there was factory and clerical work or household service.

A group of Philadelphia women recognized that gardening, which was deemed an acceptable female occupation, could be a vehicle to expand educational and career opportunities for women. These women were not radical in their lifestyle or beliefs–all were mainstream, most were married, most were middle or upper class, all wore hats, gloves, and the expected respectable female attire of the day, but they did want to change their lives. With that goal in mind, a group of women banded together to create the first garden club as a means for women to learn more about plants and use this expertise to have an impact on their community. That was followed by a group of women who decided to create the Pennsylvania School of Horticulture for Women, which trained women for jobs in the agricultural and nursery industries. These efforts led to the formation of two national organizations—the Garden Club of America and the Woman's National Farm & Garden Association—and work with the World War I Women's Land Army coordinating food production both at home and abroad. Still other women’s groups were in the forefront of the historic preservation movement.

Today we enjoy the legacy these groundbreaking women left behind: a wealth of public gardens, a vibrant network of garden clubs, and a tradition of green activism that have made Philadelphia the capital of horticulture in North America.

On this tour you will explore their contributions to the North American gardening tradition by visiting the gardens they created, the institutions they founded, the neighborhoods they preserved, and the historic landscapes they saved from destruction.