A tiny greenhouse in Chamblee may hold the wow factor for this year's Southeastern Flower Show.

Over the years, its owner, Atlanta garden designer Alex Smith, has earned a reputation for his success with forcing into early bloom the plants he uses in the show gardens he creates.

Photos by LOUIE FAVORITE / Staff (ENLARGE)
Above: Garden designer Alex Smith grooms one of the many geraniums in his greenhouse for the large garden he's designed for next week's Italian-themed Southeastern Flower Show. Below: A native azalea should blossom right on cue.
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In his greenhouse, Smith covered plants' rootballs with blankets and bags of mulch to force budding.
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To create a hedge around his bocce ball court, Smith planted Korean boxwoods last summer in box planters that he built at a nursery. The planters are in 8-foot sections for easy transport this weekend to the Georgia World Congress Center.
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This year, Smith is designing the show's largest competitive garden ever, at 3,500 square feet. And while his greenhouse is stacked with deep purple clematis, snow-white geraniums and brilliant gold native azaleas — all timed to burst into bloom next week — the show theme, "The Italian Experience," presents a new twist.

"A real Italian garden doesn't have a lot of color," Smith says.

Instead, Italian designs emphasize dark evergreens, formal simplicity and soothing water features.

Yet organizers of next week's five-day horticultural hoedown at downtown's Georgia World Congress Center insist visitors are in for a treat that's, in a word, bellissimo.

"We're your passport to Italy," show chairwoman Minnie Bob Campbell says. "Everything will have a touch of Italian in it."

The 19th annual show, founded to benefit the Atlanta Botanical Garden but now an independent cultural event, offers its traditional competitions in horticulture, floral and garden design; expert-led seminars; and a marketplace of gardening vendors. Only, this year exhibitors will be required to interpret Italian film, opera, literature, fashion and food in their displays.

As always, the major draw promises to be about 30 life-size gardens, designed months ago but not installed until this weekend in time for Tuesday's judging.

Smith, a top landscape winner in previous shows, says he didn't set out to create so large a garden, at 70 feet by 50 feet. "It just happened."

Dubbed "Alfresco," the garden is as much about function as it is drama, as any real-life garden should be. This one will emphasize outdoor living, complete with — drumroll, please — a 400-square-foot, regulation-size bocce ball court bordered in a clipped boxwood hedge.

"I've always tried to do practical gardens, not just theatrical ones," Smith says.

Overlooking the court will be a bistro cafe — terraced with the help of a rental stage platform and backed by 10-foot "aged" stuccoed walls made of Styrofoam and shrouded with clematis vines. Behind the walls, the designer will further combat the exhibit hall's cavernous ceilings by creating the illusion of height. His trick? Italian cypresses placed on pallets so that the trees appear even taller. Set inside an arched wall niche will be a venerable agave, and Italian terra-cotta pots, placed throughout the garden, will feature Mediterranean plants.

Even with a 20-member crew, including masons, gardeners and laborers, Smith says, the four-day window for installation will be "tight." And because the show is earlier than in past years, there's been less time for designers to force their plants to unfurl their buds and leaves early, he says, noting they require a period of dormancy.

Smith began the process last fall, buying and storing deciduous trees and shrubs in greenhouses, both at his office and elsewhere, to heat things up. He's strung 'Jackmanii' clematis from floor to ceiling, where the vines can bask in the sunlit ceiling, and used extra lights at night to extend the "daylight" hours. He's wrapped electric blankets and stacked bags of mulch around the rootballs of flowering apricots, Carolina silver bell trees, columnar sweetgums, double-file viburnums, 'Florida Flame' azaleas and white tree-form wisteria to speed their leafing. At the show, warm water and the exhibit hall's bright lights should help as well, especially as mulch used to disguise the plants' nursery pots heats up.

The timing gets so dicey that sometimes the opposite occurs: Buds begin popping too early. Smith's already had to move a blooming 'Iceberg' rosebush from the greenhouse to a cooler to slow it down.

For his own peace of mind, he's supplementing the early color with herbs, annuals and perennials, including rosemary, purple basil, white geraniums, orange begonias, hollihocks, even tomatoes.

Tomatoes? Now, that's Italian!