Landscape Architecture and Horticulture students in the Tyler School of Art and Architecture are taking a journey into the future at the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s Philadelphia Flower Show this year, inviting visitors to “imagine a future where we embrace transformation and metamorphosis.”
“Imagine a future where we balance contemplation with collective action. Where we cultivate community and celebrate the ephemeral, the evanescent, the magical beauty of the plants and creatures that surround us.”
Students in the Landscape Architecture Design-Build Studio and Tyler School of Art and Architecture Greenhouse Education and Research Complex have spent months taking that vision of the future and turning it into tangible reality.
“The theme of this year’s show is ‘Gardens of Tomorrow’ and we’ve been exploring that theme and bouncing ideas back and forth to see what that really means and where we are going in the future,” 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. “The overarching theme of the show and of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society in general is to support individuals and communities through horticulture. With our exhibit, we’re trying to reflect upon where we want to be in five years, in 10 years, in terms of that dynamic.”
Temple’s exhibit, Reflections on Regeneration: An Artful Response to Our Changing Environment, will be presented at the Philadelphia Flower Show from Saturday, March 1, through Sunday, March 9 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.
“We really wanted to think about the ways in which being communal in practices that involve engagement and interaction with nature is something that we must continue to do as we move forward into the future,” said Benisek. “We also wanted to recognize that individual engagement with nature directly, through immersion with nature, through seeking solace in nature, has numerous benefits. Engagement from human to human, engagement from human with place, engagement from human with other living things — wildlife and living systems — is something that we wanted to show and explore; the various ways in which that can happen as part of being members of a society and a community but also as individuals.”
According to Landscape Architecture Junior Esther Landis, the goal of the 2025 exhibit is “to represent the future of gardening and plants within the built environment.”
“We’re focusing on how we interact with plants as humans, particularly in locations in cities and places where we are living. We want to show ways in which we can incorporate plants as well as reuse materials that we might not think typically about,” she said. “My biggest takeaway from this process has been gaining a better understanding of how important every little detail is. In past studio classes we didn’t have to think about so many small details like how many screws we need or what specific color of paint we need to order. This whole experience is unique; it’s unlike any other class that Temple offers.”
From Design to Reality
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.
“Each year we have the students react to the theme that we’ve established to come up with various ideas and then we go through a lot of images and word searches and try to build upon that. We pin them up, we look at them, we react to them, we review them,” said LoFurno, who has been involved in developing Temple’s Flower Show exhibits since 2007. “We try to consider every idea — the students play a huge part in which direction we take. In the end, we have to assimilate all of these ideas and make a unified presentation.”
The student team for the 2025 exhibit includes Landscape Architecture students Morgan Barnes, Justin Border, Cameron Coless, Devin Dawson, Sophia Downs, Julianna Dubowski, Talya Karmen-Chan, Esther Landis, Kimberly Leptuck and Tarek Riad.
Horticulture students Jane Lally and Luke Natale, Landscape Architecture senior Owen Lambert, and Brianna Bee, who is completing the Horticultural Therapy Certificate Program, are working with Benjamin Snyder, Manager of the Tyler School of Art and Architecture Greenhouse Education and Research Complex, preparing 1,269 individual plants representing 65 different taxa for the exhibit.
Embracing Transformation and Wildness; Finding Comfort in Transformation
According to Benisek, the 2025 exhibit includes several areas dedicated to specific themes, including three distinct gardens surrounding a central walkway. Designed to emphasize that all of us can “participate in the natural world and cultivate a relationship with nature,” the exhibit explores reflective vernal pools, aquatic plants, wild hedgerows, a woodland refuge, community gardens and imaginative built aspects such as reflective orbs and glass blocks.
“I think one of the big strengths of our exhibit is that it’s trying to be forward-facing in thinking about the future but also grounded in some of the traditions in terms of form and material character that we utilize and look back to year over year, and really century over century, in landscape design,” she said. “We were inspired by many different things this year, but first and foremost by direct engagement with nature — it’s a thread that I think runs through all of the exhibits that we produce at Temple University — while increasingly thinking about tomorrow.”
The Garden of Solace, one of the three main areas of the exhibit, “is about the natural world and letting nature heal,” said Landscape Architecture Junior Talya Karmen-Chan.
“For our exhibit, we thought a lot about the adaptive reuse of natural materials. A lot of what we are presenting focuses on themes of resiliency, regeneration and sustainability,” she said. “For the Garden of Solace specifically, we thought a lot about themes of nature taking over — frogs, other amphibians and deer that are native to this region existing in their natural habitats. Hopefully what we will be able to share are ideas that help people make more sustainable choices in their gardens at home.”
Cameron Coless is one of the Landscape Architecture students focusing on the community garden — The Garden of Eatin’.
“We placed a big emphasis on repurposed materials and community building — the social aspects of a community garden. We also wanted to focus on food insecurity; we wanted to include a lot of vegetables and medicinal herbs,” she said. “Our goal was to show sustainable ways to incorporate edible gardening. I hope that Flower Show visitors take away with them some ideas that they can do at their own homes — we focused on a lot of DIY aspects.”
If You Build It…
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, “definitely promotes skill we might not experience otherwise,” said Landscape Architecture junior Julianna Dubowski.
“For me personally, this semester I’ve had the opportunity to focus and learn more about materials in terms of designing. With this project, we’re involved in everything that goes into creating a project — it’s much easier to think about the built elements now while we are designing,” she said. “To me, being part of the Flower Show, I’ve been waiting for this moment for the past three years. I learned in my freshman year I wouldn’t just be designing something on paper, it would actually be something that I was going to build, something I’d be able to see in person. It’s such an important aspect of the profession, going well beyond just the design phase.”
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.