Latest / Garden Like / Garden Like Epcot's World Showcase
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- Kelsey: It's three o'clock in the morning and it's dark, and there's a gardener already at work. Nobody else is here yet, and somewhere there's a hose running. She has an area assigned to her, and when she talks about it, she calls it, in her words, my country's. She'll check what the weather did overnight, water, weed, and see what people did to the beds yesterday. And the part she likes best is the pots. She designs them, just not freely. Every container she plants sits inside of a color scheme that was decided for that piece of ground decades before she got there, and her job is to upkeep it. In six hours, nearly forty thousand people will come through here, they'll take shade under the dark timber buildings, they'll stand under a roof with grass growing on it, they'll photograph the medieval stave church, and some of them will walk straight through her cool toned beds. The blues, the whites, the silvery leaves that look like someone breathed frost on them. some will drop trash. Somebody else will pull a needle off of what looks like a thin Christmas tree. Visually, all signs point to it being in a cold climate, but her shift is only getting hotter. The sun is up, the humidity is making her shirt look like an inkblot test. And in the building next to her, an animatronic Elsa is singing, Let It Go. This is the Norway Pavilion in a Walt Disney World theme park called Epcot. And most of the reason it even feels like Norway at all is the plants this gardener is taking care of. Welcome to Garden Like, the podcast that teaches you how to garden like worlds both real and imagined. I'm your experimental prototype gardener of Tomorrow, Kelsey Siegeloff, and today I am nerding out about one of my favorite garden peeping locations on this planet, World Showcase in Epcot, which, as of today, is 44 years old. Happy birthday, Epcot! If you're wondering why on earth I'd kick off a gardening podcast with an episode about a theme park. The cultural historian Margaret J. King has an answer. She wrote a paper about what separates a theme park from an amusement park, and she landed on this. And I quote: Landscaping and green space are the distinctive features of the theme park. The plants, that's the difference. And what makes Disney landscaping in particular special is it doesn't just exist to be pretty, it exists to tell stories. In the 1988 book, Gardens of the Walt Disney World Resort, author Dee Hansford put it best. Quote, the gardens of the Walt Disney World Resort are giant outdoor stages where plants are featured performers. Gardens are designed to immerse guests in a fantasy world of another time, another culture, another place. All of that work all done through plants. And that's the whole idea behind my podcast. Most garden advice starts in a garden, and for my gardening journey, it didn't. The places that taught me to look at plants closely were things like theme parks, movies, video games, places where planting was doing a job beyond filling a flower bed. So that's what the garden like podcast is. Every episode, I'm gonna take a world real or imagined. And work out what its gardens are actually doing and what you can take home from it. So some of those episodes that'll be me doing a deep dive, like in this one, but most of them are gonna be conversations with the horticulturists, historians, designers, and authors who build these places and study them. And today that means figuring out exactly how Epcot makes you feel like you've traveled to 11 completely different places. through gardens, even though every single one of them sits in central Florida. But before we could talk about plants, let's talk about what Epcot actually is, starting with the name itself. So Epcot is actually an acronym. It stood for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. And originally it wasn't even meant to be a theme park. So Walt Disney planned a working city where people could actually live in it and try out new technology as it wasn't invented. There was a film he made about it in 1966, and this is how he described Epcot. Walt Disney died before any of it got built, and what opened in nineteen eighty-two was a theme park instead. Epcot is one of the four Walt Disney World theme parks in Orlando, Florida. And the park is sort of shaped like a snowman. So if you picture two circles stacked on top of each other, but if you're entering the park, it's an upside-down snowman. In the smaller sort ahead of the snowman half, you've got landmarks like the Epcot ball, which looks like a giant golf ball and isn't a giant golf ball, plus other attractions like Test Track, Soren, and my personal favorite because of all of its planty goodness, living with the land. As you walk from the front half towards the back half, toward the big circle of my upside down snowman, there's a large circular body of water. And when you look out across it, you can see things like a Japanese pagoda, a Mesoamerican pyramid, Norwegian stave church, and also the Eiffel Tower, That's World Showcase and what we're gonna talk about today. So it's 11 countries in a ring around a lake, and the walk all around that ring is just over a mile. A lot of Disney fans like to debate the correct order to visit them in, and for the purposes of this episode, we are going to go left to right. Mexico, Norway, China, Germany, Italy, the American Adventure, also known as the US, Japan, Morocco, France, the United Kingdom, and Canada are the different countries. as you walk between them, everything changes. The architecture changes, the food changes, the music changes. Each pavilion has its own soundtrack coming out of hidden speakers, and it crossfades as you go from one country into the next. And so does the ground under your feet. according to Allyears.com, Germany's pavement is stamped to read as old brickwork, and Italy's copies the paving pattern in Saint Mark's Square. And Morocco uses two entirely different pavings for two different ages of the city. There's neat ordered brick in the new town and deliberately more rough ground with exposed stone in the old one. And if you've heard of Epcot, you might have heard that some guests like to drink around the world. So margaritas in Mexico, sake in Japan, a little something for everybody. But for me, I'm much more of a plants around the world kind of gal, because in every pavilion the plants completely change. And that's a large part of why it works, that immersion works, which is a hard thing to pull off depending on the country you're representing. Central Florida is in what's called a humid subtropical climate. Hot, wet summers, mild winters, and so is southern Japan, and so is southeastern China. Mexico and Morocco also bring their own heat to match that Florida heat. But a country like Norway doesn't, and Canada doesn't. A northern European garden and a central Florida garden have little in common. So when I talk about how we can garden like Epcot's World Showcase, What I'm really talking about is how to garden like a climate that isn't yours. So, how do they do it? How do you use plants that can survive in Florida and still make somebody feel like they've gone to a completely different country? Today we're gonna talk about the five Ps, which is my own framework I've created for how Disney Gardens. The first four Ps are palette, profile, pattern, and placement. Palette, like a painter's, is the set of colors they're working from. Profile is the shape of the plant. Pattern is how the plants are arranged. And placement is where you put them in regards to the person viewing them. The first two are about the plant, and the second two are about the arrangement. And the fifth P we will save for later, but for now let's break down those four Ps. Starting with palette. Every pavilion, every country has an assigned color palette that distinguishes it from other pavilions. And Disney uses that color in a few different ways to represent character, temperature, flavor, scent, and even parts of a landscape. I spoke with a former Disney horticulturist who explained to me that Germany's red colors is mostly there to match Snow White since you can meet her in the pavilion. And during the International Flower and Garden Festival, which is an annual festival at Epcot, it's about three months every spring full of display gardens, topiaries. You can see Snow White and the Seven Dwarves as topiary. And for those who don't know, a topiary is a plant clipped and trained into a shape that it wouldn't necessarily grow into on its own. So like a bush cut to look like a person, basically. Another great example of palette being used is when I was over in the Noray Pavilion, I couldn't help but notice the plant color scheme matches the Arundel flag from the movie Frozen with blues and purples. And also during the Flower and Garden Festival, there's a Peter Pantopiri, and around him you're gonna see yellow pixie dust, aka yellow plants. Now most of us don't have a licensed character topiary in the yard. If you do, I am jealous. But you still could use color to stand in for a person. That rose that's your grandmother's, the blue that your mother always had by the door, a plant representing a person, whether that person is real or imagined. Color also carries temperature. The Mexico pavilion uses reds, oranges, yellows, and it reads as heat. On the other side of World Showcase, Canada changes colors as you move through it. So down by the maple Sierra popcorn cart, you're gonna see a lot more reds, but further up, you're gonna get to those purples. And that's because when you're moving up through that pavilion, you're moving north into the cold. So temperature is made spatial with plants. Not only that, but in the Canada Pavilion, they also plant white flowers and white variegated leaves in the wintertime. So white variegated means leaves with white or cream markings across the green instead of the solid green leaves. And that variegation helps tell the story of snow. But of all the examples of this I could talk about, my favorite version is during Epcot Flower and Garden Festival, I saw Dusty Miller, which is a silvery white leafy plant that kind of looks like snowflakes, planted at the feet of the Elsa Topieri, and not at Anna's. These are two characters from Frozen. Elsa's ice magic only reached the plants in front of herself and not in front of her sister. so their story, Elsa's powers, is being told through the color of plants. And a palette can point at things that aren't visual at all. For example, Morocco has orange in its plantings, but it's not only to represent the heat I talked about earlier. Those warm colors are there to evoke Moroccan spices like cumin, ginger, turmeric, saffron. And another example of smells as a visual, France is to represent a perfume-inspired garden. There's actually a perfumery in the pavilion, and the flowers there are to remind you of those perfumey smells. And it's not just the visual representation of scent, there's also scent as scent. In the book The Epcot Explorers Encyclopedia, author R.A. Peterson writes that in the Germany Pavilion, old world roses were planted near the promenade in Germany. Those are these older pre-Victorian rose varieties that keep their full fragrance. So the storytelling is not just visually telling you about smell, but you're actually smelling the theme. You've got scent as cultural history. Palette can also represent an entire landscape. Sometimes the color isn't standing in for a smell or a character. During Flowering Garden over at the American Adventure Pavilion, there is a gorgeous topiary of Princess Tiana from The Princess and the Frog, and she appears to be standing in a bayou. But there's no water in the bed. There was yellow planting for the land and this purpley blue planting for the water and lily pad props on stakes to finish it. So color can be character, a temperature, a taste, a smell, a piece of history, or even a bayou that wasn't there. And while palette carries a lot of the storytelling, the profile, our next P, of the plants makes just as much of a difference. Profile is the silhouette or shape of a plant, whether the plant is a spike, a mound, a fountain, a cloud. When you're standing in the transition between Mexico and Norway, it is my favorite example. You can see a split right down the middle of the planting, where on the left side, looking at Mexico, there's these large, shiny green leaves that look super tropical. And right next to them are these skinny conan needle trees that give you that northern, colder look. Same soil, same irrigation, two different countries with very different tree shapes. An Epcot has a couple of ways, to my understanding, of getting the right profile. One, if the real plant works, they use the real plant. So in Italy, there's olive trees. They're real olive trees, but in Florida, they just don't fruit, which is the creation of the olive itself. Because Florida is too humid and an olive tree, a real olive tree, needs a stretch of cold weather before it will create the olives. The Japanese pavilion can have a lot of Japanese plants because the climate is similar enough. So there's glossy evergreen shrubs with big rows like flowers, azaleas, bamboo, So when you can have the real thing, and if it's in your own garden, make sure it's not invasive, you could have the real thing. Where the magic of Disney's horticulture comes in is when the real thing won't work, they match the shape. So in Norway, the tree looks Nordic, but it's a southern plant. A real spruce would want cold winters and cool summers, and Central Florida doesn't really have that, but the shape sells it. You've got that tall, straight trunk. The conical needled top reads as cold country to any person who's ever watched a Hallmark movie. Another cold replacement, Canada can't have a sugar maple because Florida's too hot for sugar maples. So instead replace it with a red maple, which is native in Florida. It grows wild in flatwoods and swamps statewide. So you've got a tree standing in for Canada's national emblem as a Florida native. which as a former Floridian and someone who's a half Canadian, I personally love. The next P is pattern. Palette sets the temperature, profile gets the shapes right. Pattern is what turns a collection of correct plants into a garden that belongs to a specific culture. The thing that really, really wows me about Epcot's gardens in World Showcase is building garden types that the cultures in World Showcase either popularized or invented. Take the United Kingdom. There is so much overlap of gardeny history there. There's a hedge maze, a butterfly garden, a knot garden, which is where low hedges are clipped into a flat interlacing pattern. It looks like a woven design you're standing on top of. a cottage-style planting attached to a replica of Anne Hathaway's cottage. Not Princess Diaries, Anne Hathaway. This is Shakespeare's wife Anne Hathaway. And I want to get a bit more specific about that cottage because the Shakespeare garden here really shines. In 1923, somebody laid a new sewer straight across the garden at the real Anne Hathaway's cottage in England. Which is a very glamorous way for a famous garden to get destroyed. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust brought in the English horticulturist Ellen Wilmot to put it back. She drew the garden up across two seasons, nineteen twenty four, nineteen twenty-five, leaned into pastel shades, and a great many of the plants she chose are named in Shakespeare's plays. Roses, irises, daffodils, thistles. One of the Disney horticulturists I spoke with told me that the Shakespeare garden at the UK Pavilion follows those same rules, Which makes Epcot's version a Florida recreation of a 1920s English recreation of an Elizabethan garden, because a rose planted by any other name would smell as sweet. And it's not just the UK pavilion. Norway has a Torf Tok, a Norwegian sod roof, which is a technique that's thousands of years old. Canada's Victoria Gardens are an homage to the Butch Art Gardens outside Victoria, British Columbia, and France has an arrangement of low growing shrubs clipped into a Florida Lee. Even the pots used in these gardens represent thousands of years of history. Italy has plants in terracotta pots, China has plants in dragon egg pots, and on the streets of Paris, the trees are actually not in a pot, they are in metal grates, so it feels like a city. And if we want the opposite of that city feeling, in the Mexico pavilion the plants take on a naturalistic pattern. A naturalistic garden is meant to feel like a natural ecosystem. So in Mexico, the planting is packed. Big leaves overlapping, big leaves, layers stacked front to back. There's so much to look at, both on the ground and up in the trees. In the book The Epcot Explorer's Encyclopedia, Petterson wrote the pavilion is, quote, meant to rise up from the wilds and not be as tightly controlled garden as seen in France and the UK. Instead, it reads as abundant, as a jungle, as natural, which doesn't mean that nobody planned this pattern. Somebody planned every inch of it. It's uneven on purpose, and that's the pattern. And placement, that fourth P is all about the plants in relation to the person looking at them. Placement also impacts how noticeable a plant is to the viewer. Katie Moss Warner ran horticulture at Walt Disney World for 24 years, ending as director of horticulture. In an interview on the Florida Nursery Growers and Landscape Association's Plant People podcast, she described putting color at three different height levels in order to make the plants noticeable. First one is at the ground level, at the threshold, bedding right in front of guests when they walk in. Second is eye level in hanging baskets. And what's super cool is at the time that she started, the industry didn't have cascading flowering plants, so she had to think about ways to have hanging baskets before there was lots of plants available that do that kind of spilling over the edge that we see now. And the third level was containers where there isn't a bed to put plants in, like you might see in the Italy pavilion. to the placement of plants to be noticed, plants can also be placed in specific ways to make spaces look bigger. In Diane Shu's 1996 master's thesis on horticulture and theme parks, she reported what Walt Disney World horticulturist told her: quote, in Italy, an illusion of an Italian countryside and in Canada, the illusion of a majestic mountain are created using progressively shorter trees and shrubs moving from the front of the garden to the back of the garden for forced perspective. Forced perspective in plants. If that phrase is new to you, forced perspective is a film trick. You make the faraway thing smaller than it should be so the eye reads it as further away than it actually is. And Disney does this a lot with buildings. For example, the upper floors of Cinderella Castle are built at a smaller scale, so the castle looks taller than it is. And here they're doing that with living plants. So that's four palette profile pattern and placement. And the fifth is progress, which goes all the way back to the original idea A community of tomorrow that will never be completed. The first four P's are design tools, and the fifth one is what makes the first four possible. Because I've spent this entire episode describing Epcot like it's some sort of finished design. It isn't. It was trial and error and still is. In fact, literal trials. When Katie Moss Warner, former director of horticulture of Walt Disney World, arrived at the theme parks in 1976. She was told that you can't grow bedding plants in Florida. And the reasons were good. Central Florida and soil never gets cold enough to knock back diseases and root pests that a northern winter would kill off. In that same FNGLA plant people podcast I mentioned earlier, she explained her fix was to run trials. Trial and error. Grow them side by side, find out which ones can actually live, then order by the full name, Heather Will Brown, who was the first woman on the Walt Disney World Horticultural team, built and ran the bedding plant trials from around 1979 and kept records until she retired. when facing not being able to grow bedding plants in Florida, instead they looked at ways of progressing. They did trials And your plants, whether indoor or outdoor plants, can be a trial garden too. And another important part of progress as the fifth P is understanding that a dead plant isn't a failure, it's data. And many people have to go through figuring that out. Epcot found that out fast. Within about a year of the park opening, a freeze killed all the trees the entrance was designed around. Disney historian Jim Corcus spoke to John Hench who spent decades at Disney, including as senior vice president at Walt Disney Imagineering, which is the department responsible for designing and creating all Disney theme parks, resorts, attraction shows, and even cruise ships. for your first visit.net, and Hench said, quote, One of my favorite places in any of the theme parks in relation to color would be in Florida at the entrance of Epcot Center. Particularly the way it was when it opened with the marvelous jacaranda trees. The entrance would have been a very special paradise once a year with jacarandas and those beautiful blue-violet colors. Would have been. So here's what happened. Christmas Day 1983 lows around 20 degrees Fahrenheit. That's minus 7 Celsius across Central Florida, even going down to 14 degrees in the worst spots, minus 10 Celsius. The frost took the trees out. Two years later, in January 1985, there was another statewide hard freeze. And that one landed while the replacement trees planted after 1983 were pushing new growth. So that was bad timing. And the freezes keep coming. A hard freeze hit Central Florida in late January 2026, and I actually visited the parks a few weeks later, and there were these cute little white signs throughout the parks from their horticulture team that read, Please pardon our appearance. We had a visit from Jack Frost. We are in the process of replanting this area for future enjoyment. according to Walt Disney World News today, Epcot removed palm trees near Spaceship Earth, aka Epcot Ball. In May due to that twenty twenty six frost damage. 44 years in and freezing, understandably, is still this live operating problem. The gardens can never be finished. You keep having to progress after different incidents and learn and grow. So to garden like Epcot's World Showcase, it isn't only those four Ps. That fifth P, the willingness to try something, pay attention to what happened, changed it, keep going, to progress, to have progress is just as important. So I promised you we would figure out how we could do this all at home. How do we apply everything we've learned today to our own gardens and our own windowsills? Step one is you're gonna wanna define your four peas and take those four peas to your local plant nursery. So instead of saying things like, I need a dwarf Alberta spruce, instead focus on those peas. So I need something narrow and cone-shaped that stays green all winter and that will survive where I live. You could also write down those four Ps and then use national or regional horticultural resources to choose the plant you want. So in the US, it's your state's cooperative extension service. Mine in Massachusetts is UMass Extension. Outside of the US, check for your national or regional horticultural society. They'll publish things like regional plant lists, help you learn how to grow in your conditions. and if we're thinking like Epcot, if you want it to feel cold, do that palette of blue, white, silvers, pale pinks, profiles or those narrow, upright cone shaped trees. Pattern, you might want to space apart your plants a bit more. And then when you think about placement, do you want it eye level, the bedding when you walk in, where's the place that you want your viewer to see these? You could also think of things like lighting. Do you want a cooler white light bulb in a lamp nearby? And if you want it to feel like the hot tropics, you've got those reds and oranges and yellows, big bold leaves when you're thinking about the profile, a leaf the size of your face, my house plant people, this is gonna be your easiest route. For the pattern, layer it, overlap things, hide the soil front to back, irregular on purpose, odd numbers of plants on a shelf. And once again, thinking about the placement of those plants. So for example, if I want a cozy reading nook that feels like the hot tropics, I'm going to make sure that my seat is going to be under the branch of a nice big green Monstera. So what does it mean to actually garden like Epcot's World Showcase? Think about palette profile, pattern placement, and most importantly, progress. Once you start looking for those, you're gonna find gardens doing things like this everywhere, whether it's theme parks, movies, games, historic houses, places that you wouldn't have filed under gardening to begin with. And that's what this show is going to keep looking for. In season one, you'll hear garden inspiration from cemeteries, giant pumpkins, history, and beyond. This was the first episode of Garden Like, so please rate, review, and subscribe wherever you're listening, and come find at Garden Like Pod on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. If you got a question for a future mailbag episode or a world you think I should explore gardening like, please write to gardenlikepod at gmail.com. This episode of Garden Like was hosted and edited by Kelsey Siegeloff and produced by Deanna Healy. I'll see you next time.