A lone bird twitters and you think: It’s almost spring.
The sulky sun pokes briefly from behind the gray and you think: I swear, I feel it in my bones.
You look at the five-day forecast and you think: Not all of Florida is tacky, is it?
This is why we need the Spring Flower Show at the Garfield Park Conservatory.
You can smell the show before you see it. The fragrance lures you on, under the high glass dome and the snowy sky beyond, past the palm trees, on through a pair of swinging wooden doors marked “Show House.”
Then there it is. White azaleas, pink camellias, blooming orange jasmine. Spring in January on Chicago’s West Side.
“Have you seen ‘The Dilemma?'” said Mary Eysenbach, the conservatory’s director, when I dropped by Thursday. She and Matt Barrett, the floriculturist foreman, were showing me around.
All I’ve seen of “The Dilemma” are the billboards and the bad reviews, so it was unclear what Vince Vaughn’s latest movie had to do with the flower show. She and Barrett explained.
One of movie’s scenes, featuring Winona Ryder and Vince Vaughn, is filmed in the conservatory, and the director, Ron Howard, was amazed that the space wasn’t used in more movies.
“It’s two acres under glass,” Barrett said. “Ron Howard was blown away.”
In any season, the Garfield Park Conservatory is a place not as well-known as it deserves to be, and in any season it’s an astonishing sanctuary in the jangling city. This time of year, with real spring still a mirage on the far horizon, it’s especially seductive.
“Take a whiff of those purple stock and hyacinths,” Barrett said as we walked through the spring show.
I sniffed and had visions of July.
“Go rub that,” he said.
I crouched, rubbed the leaves of a low plant and had visions of a massage.
“Scented geranium,” he said. “Makes you forget it’s snowing outside, doesn’t it?”
For as long as there has been a Chicago, there have been Chicago people who needed to smell and touch and see flowers before the seasons obliged.
The Garfield Park Conservatory has obliged regularly since it opened with a spring show 103 years ago.
Some of the azaleas on display today are descended from flowers in the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.
But flowers don’t just pop out of the January dirt. The ones here — like the ones at the Spring Flower Show at the smaller Lincoln Park Conservatory — are cultivated months in advance. Thousands of flowers are coaxed to life in conservatory greenhouses, under artificial lights, waiting like understudies for their shift in the showroom.
Once on public display, they rely on the sun, a fickle source in winter.
“Both shows aren’t flowering as much as we’d like,” said Eysenbach. She shook a fist at the gray sky. “Could you please get sunny?”
Still, there are more flowers here than you’ll see anywhere else in town, and though the show doesn’t officially open until Saturday, visitors are already strolling through, looking to get a jump on April.
On my way out, Eysenbach handed me a sheet of typed paper. Its title: “The Power of Flowers.”
“Our lives today are incredibly fast paced and stressful,” it said. “We spend billions of dollars a year on ways to cure our pervasive anxiety. Yet one cure is surprisingly simple and affordable: flowers. Believe it or not, research shows that flowers have the power to reduce stress and generate feelings of happiness.”
I can’t vouch for the Harvard study it cites, but I will vouch for the conclusion.
