Flowers

Few bands contain the moody mix of New Wave glitz and heartland earnestness that the Killers do. Truth be told, no other band has the weird, showy blend that Brandon Flowers and Co. have. The Killers' brash feel for Springsteen huskiness and luxurious Duran Duran grace - with a little schmaltz in honor of their hometown, Las Vegas, thrown in for good measure - is theirs and theirs alone. If you truly craved that mash-up of the tartly phony (nothing wrong with plastic) and the ardently windswept, the grandly European and the heartily American, you made your way to the Killers sold-out show at Camden's Susquehanna Center on a misty Sunday night.

Spring arrived at an old Main Line estate to find enormous changes. The rolling lawns around the mansion are scarred with vast expanses of muddy earth where new homes soon will be built. A magnificent copper beech that adorned the property for generations had been cut down over the winter. The stone wall that once served as the entrance to the graceful old property was bulldozed away months ago, as were the evergreen plantings alongside it. Only a few forgotten rocks remain. Nobody, however, bothered to tell the crocuses.

Let springtime begin, at least at the Civic Center, where the Philadelphia Flower Show will blossom for eight days beginning today. The theme of this year's show is "Kaleidoscope - The Wonderful World of Color," featuring color displays from the seasons of the year and from different eras. The show will be open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. today and next Sunday, and from 10 to 9:30 p.m. Monday through Saturday.

When Jack and Emily Aprill first covered 30 acres with plants that hummingbirds love, it was a hobby. For 19 years, however, they have let the public in to see the tiny birds as they pause to spend August amid the swamp hyacinths, salvia, cinnamon ferns and cardinal flowers.

My flower-arranging capabilities have never gone far beyond the stuff-it- all-in-a-vase phase, and nine times out of 10 the flowers would have looked better if I had left them out in the garden or at the florist. Cheryl Monroe of West Chester, on the other hand, can take a dozen flowers, a simple vase, some filler greenery and within minutes create a delightful arrangement. She insists this ability is not inborn; often, she says, people just do not know what flowers to buy, what to put them in or how to take care of them.

Many of Pearl Bailey's VIP friends couldn't be on North Broad Street yesterday to bid a personal farewell to the show business legend. So they said their goodbyes with flowers. Among them were former President Gerald Ford and his wife Betty. "Pearl gave her incredible joy and talent to the world," read a card, addressed to Bailey's family, that accompanied a spray of flowers placed just to the left of the casket. "We will miss her," added the Fords, "but rejoice in having been permitted into her life.

'There's power in flowers," my pop the florist forever preached. Flowers were a gift like other natural gifts - a full moon, the mountains, rainbows and sunsets. Flowers, he would remind me, are a steady force, softening even the toughest among us. Even roofers send their hearts in a vase. But most of all, my pop told me, flowers speak to the verities of the heart and soul: Honor, truth, love. God, he was right. One day long ago, as I was working side by side with him in his tiny flower shop in the Paradise section of the city, I was telling him I had taken out a French major at Temple, but there wasn't enough spark to turn on a pocket flashlight.

Flower lust is a condition in which a person craves the sight of flowers. She can't get enough. She is drawn like a bee into other people's gardens, where she surveys the blooming variety covetously to see what would work in her own yard. She haunts nurseries, where the proprietors quickly realize they are dealing with an addict and get to know her by name. When the gardening season ends, she consults catalogues and plans for spring. If she tries to get at the root of her obsession, it seems to be color itself she desires, not unlike the grandmother Baby Suggs in Toni Morrison's Beloved, who called for pink and pondered the orange square in her quilt.

Annual statice is wonderful for a variety of bouquets and projects because of its wide array of colors. Elise Payne grows bunches of statice in her community garden plot and has developed a small business drying and using it to decorate gift items. You should be able to purchase transplants next month, but Payne, of Strafford, Chester County, prefers to grow her statice from seed, sowing it inside on a windowsill or under light units during the last week of April. Like globe amaranth, annual statice is sensitive to cold, damp soil, so Payne suggests waiting until the first week of June to transplant the seedlings, unless you live in a sheltered location where the soil warms up quickly.

What we like: The Villanova shop sells bunches of fresh flowers, ideal to surprise a sweetheart, for just $10 every day. The colorful floral selections include carnations, mini-carnations, alstroemeria, limonium and monticasino aster. Flowers on the Avenue is a full-service store that for more than 20 years has offered garden-style arrangements customized for weddings and funerals as well as personalized get-well arrangements, bouquets for proms, and single stems for dance recitals and school award nights.

If you can't control the weather, try controlling television weather forecasters. Drew Becher, president of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, recently blasted television and radio "snowmaggedon" scenarios that proved false, yet shriveled the Philadelphia Flower Show's ticket sales like an early frost. The venerable event, the society's principal fund-raiser, suffered a 17 percent drop in attendance in March and lost $1.2 million. Now, PHS is scurrying to make up the difference.

Few bands contain the moody mix of New Wave glitz and heartland earnestness that the Killers do. Truth be told, no other band has the weird, showy blend that Brandon Flowers and Co. have. The Killers' brash feel for Springsteen huskiness and luxurious Duran Duran grace - with a little schmaltz in honor of their hometown, Las Vegas, thrown in for good measure - is theirs and theirs alone. If you truly craved that mash-up of the tartly phony (nothing wrong with plastic) and the ardently windswept, the grandly European and the heartily American, you made your way to the Killers sold-out show at Camden's Susquehanna Center on a misty Sunday night.

Erica Ragazzone left nothing to chance Monday. Ragazzone pitched a shutout, and hit a game-winning, two-run home run in the bottom of the seventh to give St. Hubert a 2-0 victory over Little Flower in the Catholic League semifinals at Arcadia University in Glenside. Ragazzone hit a 3-2 pitch over the left-field fence. She went 3 for 3. She also threw seven innings, allowing three hits and striking out four. In the other semi, Bonner-Prendergast advanced to the league title game for the first time since 2006, beating Lansdale Catholic, 2-0, at Arcadia.

The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society usually makes about $1 million in profits from the Philadelphia Flower Show. But not this year. The 2013 show actually fell short about $1.2 million, not an unprecedented event in its 184-year history but a short-term disaster for the many urban "greening" programs it supports. PHS president Drew Becher is now scrambling to cut costs - and to raise $1 million for programs and $200,000 for Flower Show expenses from PHS members and an insurance policy.

DAVID PERRI became streets commissioner on Monday. By yesterday he'd gotten the Junk Cars guys to remove their junky signs. Well, that was quick. Only the day before, the Junk Cars guys - they say their names are Joe and John - had no intention of removing their 8-by-11 posters, which offer $200-$450 for beaters. "We know they're illegal, but we need to make a living," said Joe. I'd called him at 215-278-1161 to ask why he'd papered Fairmount and the Lower Northeast with the forbidden signs.

IN "THE EMPEROR'S New Clothes," a preening monarch is hoodwinked into believing that he's just bought a magnificent outfit when all he's been sold is a bill of (dry) goods. Prancing around in what he thinks is cloth of gold, the emperor is complimented by his obsequious subjects. They all would have lived happily ever after had a young boy not pointed his finger and said "he's naked!" I love that story for what it tells us about the human capacity for self-delusion. We often believe what our hearts suggest despite the clear and urgent message relayed by facts.

It was at the first Philadelphia Flower Show in 1829 that a sophisticated audience of gardeners first laid eyes on some spectacular, must-have plants. There were rare and fragrant peonies from China, an exotic "coffee tree of Arabia," a double-white pomegranate, a strange new thing called a poinsettia, and a big-leaf magnolia with gonzo blooms measuring four feet around. The 2013 flower show held earlier this month also debuted some plants, although they weren't nearly as bodacious as those first ones.

  This year's attendance at the Philadelphia Flower Show, which ended Sunday, was the lowest in more than a decade, drawing 225,000 visitors - 17 percent fewer than last year - and even coming in below recession-plagued 2008. A spokesman for the show's organizer, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, blamed the threat of snow on Wednesday and Thursday. "A lot of the bus groups, for safety reasons, cancel the trips," said the spokesman, Alan Jaffe. "Numbers were all trending up until forecasts of storms on Tuesday, then actual snow on Friday.

Inquirer staff writer Virginia A. Smith is writing this week from the Philadelphia Flower Show. These posts appeared on her blog, "Kiss the Earth," at philly.com/kisstheearth. Read her stories at philly.com/ginny, and other Flower Show coverage at philly.com/flowershow. Man Cave as BBQ pit I may be the only person in Philadelphia who doesn't like the smell of meat grilling on the BBQ. When I walked into the show's new Man Cave - The Back Yard, my first thought was e wwww . But don't let me stop you. Check out the fake grass.

NEW YORK - Talk about a caffeine buzz: A new study says honeybees get a shot of caffeine from certain flowers, and it perks up their memory. That spurs them to return to the same type of plant, boosting its prospects for pollination and the future of the plant species. Maybe it shouldn't be a surprise that one of the flowers is the coffee plant. Its nectar offers about as much caffeine concentration as a cup of instant coffee, according to researchers. But some citrus plants serve caffeine too, albeit in lower concentrations.