I’ve been coming to the Indianapolis Flower & Patio Show for the past several years and was curious to see what special events and landscape elements would reflect this year’s theme of celebrating the show’s 60th Anniversary.

Similar to the Indianapolis Home Show, I was irritated by the number of salespeople there who had absolutely nothing to do with exterior design/decor, flowers or landscapes and were aggressively pitching to passerbys. Other than that, the show was great this year.

For most of my time at the show, I focused on getting some landscape design inspiration from the different patios and gardens set up around the show. One of my favorite layouts was a small patio decorated by The O Studio, a company that provides a wide range of landscape design and maintenance services.

One of the most surprising finds in the show was a shipping container building. This was something I expected to see at the Home Show earlier in the year and was happy it was here to tour through. It was decorated pretty sparsely with an industrial vibe that very much fit with the material and had a Porsche sitting in the middle of it, because… why not.

The only reference to the 60th anniversary that I noticed at the event was a “birthday cake” design by McNamara Florist. It was a uniquely-designed three layers of planters filled with flowers to mimic a tiered cake and was topped by a rotating number 60 at the top.

And, of course, there were just a LOT of flowers at the event. Some varieties I had forgotten about and took photos as a mental note to incorporate them in my spring/summer planting this year.

This year, I was particularly in the market for lawn services and was able to meet face-to-face with a vendor I had emailed a request to earlier. I was also looking for some bulbs to plant in spring but ended up deciding to wait a bit on that, and just bought some fresh cut flowers instead.

Besides my complaint about the salespeople, which will likely never end with these shows held at the Indiana State Fairgrounds, this year’s Flower & Patio Show was a great event to either make purchases of bulbs, fresh-cut flowers, and landscape decor or to talk to landscape vendors all in one place.