Mid-Atlantic Nursery Trade Show: riot prevention
If you look on the Baltimore Convention Center web site, you won't find a listing for one of its oldest and largest events: the Mid-Altantic Nursery Trade Show.
About a thousand vendors -- of everything from petunias to tractors -- line the convention center floor every January while lawn and garden center retailers look to see what they can sell their customers in the spring.
But the show isn't open to the general public. It isn't a home and garden show. There isn't anything to buy, unless you want to buy a dozen of them.
To keep the public from misunderstanding, storming the convention center and ending up disappointed or angry, MANTS, as it is called, tries to keep the lowest of low profiles.
As a result, I was asked not to write about what I saw there (journalists are admitted) until after the show closed on Friday.
Seems a little over the top to me, but I went along with the request. This is a gardening blog, after all, not a national security blog.
It was tough to visit a thousand booths and find what is new or "hot" for the 2011 gardening season. Especially since the gardening world is slow to change and even slower to test and introduce new plants.
And right now, members of the gardening industry are just happy to have survived the recession. They are not necessarily feeling confident enough for risky innovation.
But I found a few things worth mentioning, and I wrote about them today in the Baltimore Sun. Check it out. I will blog about a few others this week.
Call it my "wish list."
