Indoor Spring

Spring came to Manhattan four days early when, with no little ceremony, the 17th Annual International Flower Show opened in Grand Central Palace. For the next six days nearly 200,000 people whose fate it is to live in one of the most barren cities on the continent poured in to look at gardens, beautiful gardens unlike anything that ever grew in open air, as artificial as New York itself. Here were living tulips as big as cocoanuts, roses big as lettuce heads, dogwood trees blooming six weeks before their time, orchid sprays like swarms of giant and amorous insects.

There were a million flowers on display, and not a bug or a worm or a weed. Those who went early enough saw a Miss Doris Humphreys perform an interpretive dance (to violin accompaniment) on $1,000 worth of turf, heard a Miss Frances Johnson recite an Ode to Spring, applauded while Mr. Mei Lan-fang. China's greatest actor (TIME, Feb. 24). accepted a tulip bulb named in his honor.

Providing this magnificent display were some of the richest, most potent names in U. S. finance. Their gardeners, the men who actually did the work, grew the plants, composed these living landscapes for New Yorkers to look at. were present all last week hovering anxiously over their handiwork. Reporters noted:

Otto Hermann Kahn's J. A. Forbes

J. Pierpont Morgan's James S. Kelly

Mrs. Marshall Field's George Henry Gillies

Sidney Z. Mitchell's Alfred Reoch

Mrs. Payne Whitney's Henning Michelson

Hiram Edward Manville's T. H. Everett

George Fisher Baker Jr.'s James MacDonald

George Fisher Baker's William Ellings.

Not one of these left without at least two prizes for his employer.* Outstanding among the gardeners was Miss Marie L. Constable's able, bushy-mustached James Stuart. He it was who arranged, on a plot of approximately 600 sq. ft., Miss Constable's breathtaking Yellow Garden which won the large silver cup presented by the Royal Horticultural Society. Pale ferns, towering yellow acacias and mimosas hung over a narrow path, accented with deep orange clumps of a kind of South African flowering pineapple, professionally known as imantophyllum, more popularly Clivia.

Upstairs among the cut flowers crowds six deep gazed and sniffed at President and Mrs. Herbert Hoover, two new roses originated by famed Rosarian Lyman B. Coddington of Murray Hill, N. J. President Herbert Hoover is a very harlequin of a rose. Shaded orange, yellow and pink, it is a larger, paler Talisman. Mrs. Herbert Hoover, unlike the delicate yellow Mrs. Calvin Coolidge introduced two years ago, is a rich velvety crimson.

*Unrepresented at the New York International Flower Show was John Davison Rockefeller Sr. But in a flower show sponsored by the Halifax Garden Club of Daytona Beach, Fla., near his Ormond Beach winter home, he last week won two blue ribbons for a large basket of deep magenta petunias and a pot of Easter lilies, clapped his withered hands for joy.

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