Gardenfest is an annual event that has been taking place for 15 years in Vero Beach, Florida. I finally was able to go and boy! what a treat! I have a new fondness for air plants (Tillandsia). Tropiflora was there and what a display they had! I wished I'd had a few hundred to a thousand dollars to spend instead of a few dollars. I bought 3 small but nice pieces of cork bark for $1 each. Will use those for mounting and hanging my air plants. I bought 3 more small air plants. I also bought a live miniature ivy vine for a couple dollars. Perfect for my mini gardens. A bonsai Jade tree (also for my mini garden). And 2 more succulents whose IDs are unknown to me. No labels on them, but I thought they were cool plants and the price was right! So I came home a happy gardener!

Here are some photos I took of the displays at the Gardenfest. I was just clicking away with my camera at many of the vendor displays!

Tropiflora had a HUGE display of bromeliads and Air Plants! A truly amazing display. I spent the most time there just looking at everything! I can not believe how many species of air plants there are! Some of the plants are quite large and others very small. They were a hit at the fest! Air Plants must be "IN" style currently because many vendors were selling them. I couldn't help myself. I took lots of photos of all the different species of Tillies!

First is the Bromeliads and Tillandsias (Air Plants) from Tropiflora:





Maya Red Cap (Tilly):



Streptophylla:



Concolor:



Tropic Skye:



Mystic Circle:



Ionantha "Rubra":



Bulbosa Red Form:



I can't read the label on this species:



Houston F2:



Another ID I can't see in the photo:



Durrell:



Another Ionantha:



Showtime:



Ionantha:



Rows and baskets of Tillies:



Large tillies in the bucket:



Now on to miniature plants .... Bonsai trees and miniature gardens:









Other plants and items:

Eye-candy for sure, Becky.

I saw all those tropiflora tags.

Beautiful, Becky! Thank you for sharing I'm going to have to remember this one for next year. Vero isn't that far from me, and it looks like it would be worth the drive.

Wonderful, Becky. You really should make it over this side for one of Tropiflora's plant festivals. Usually the first weekend of April, and the first weekend of October. You'd be blown away by their home operation.

Oh, let's see, I just happen to have a couple of photos of their brom shade houses:
Mind boggling! The tilly houses aren't quite as huge, but still very large.

Becky, oh my goodness ... what a wonderful tour of that Gardenfest! I need to start a plant budget because I definitely want to be there next year when we're living in Sebastian! Wow, Wow, Wow, some really awesome Broms and I can see myself wanting to buy one of those Bonsai plants too but I bet the prices are way more than I could justify spending. I tried my hand at bonsai once, many years ago. The bending, wiring, root pruning, training etc. takes more than my attention span could handle nowadays.

Elaine, I've vacationed over your way many times over the years but have never visited Tropiflora and WOW those photos of their shade houses are amazing ... rainbows of Broms!!

I am glad y'all enjoyed those photos! Wished you could've been there to enjoy it in person! I really had fun and came home with some excellent stuff ... mostly plants!

Tropiflora had a series of photos from Gardenfest on their VIPP email today but they did not open on my computer. They have a new website and it still has a few glitches.

I got the Tropiflora e-mail today too and I've been having trouble with photos not showing up on e-mails from them for a few weeks now and yes, the new website apparently has a few glitches and I've found it to be very slow all day. Did you see their home page and the cake a customer made? I thought it was a Brom plant! http://tropiflora.com/?&v=0.66...

Yum, it looks too good to eat though.

Their pages DO take forever to load. What's up with that, I wonder? The speed reminds me of dial-up service.

I think, as ardesia said ... new website glitches.

Speaking of which. My website is down for some reason. The techs are working to get it back up.

@drdawg Ken, yes when I click on your link it says:

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access / on this server.

Additionally, a 500 internal server Error error was encountered while trying to use an Errorocument to handle the request.

Yep, I can't even bring it up.

I hope your tech people get it up and running for you real soon!

Since I can't do much of anything worthwhile, I have started photographing all my mounted orchids, and I have dozens of them that needed to be updated. Now I find that I can't even access my site to update all these orchids.

drdawg said:Since I can't do much of anything worthwhile, I have started photographing all my mounted orchids, and I have dozens of them that needed to be updated. Now I find that I can't even access my site to update all these orchids.

While you're waiting for the tech folks to fix issues with your Tropical Plants and More website, you could always upload photos of your orchids to the ATP database http://garden.org/plants/