Origins

The modern garden festival movement has its origins in post-war Germany and today any nation wishing to adopt the festival concept will probably be inspired by the German model and look to it for guidance. In 2000, Hanover hosted Germany's first world's fair, the EXPO 2000 World Exposition. This was, however, a second ‘first’, since Hanover began, in 1951, the tradition of the biennial Bundes -gartenschauen, eventually influencing the occurrence of garden festivals throughout Western Europe, Asia and North America.

Hanover, like many German cities, suffered massive bomb damage in the Second World War. The pre-war German tradition of the federal garden shows was re-established not only for the restoration of damaged parks and adjacent areas but also to provide an atmosphere of optimism and creativity. Hanoverians today take pleasure from the city forest of Eilenriede, the Tiergarten or deer park, and Herrenhäuser Gärten, the largest baroque garden in Europe. But the Stadtpark, the legacy of the 1951 federal garden show, is the most popular and now, over fifty years on, an established and mature inner-city landscape. Since this first Gartenschau at Hanover there has been a garden show every two years, with host cities now committed up to 2015.

The success of that first post-war exhibition, with more than thirty countries from Europe and elsewhere taking part, set the tone for subsequent garden shows. Other European nations were quick to realize their potential benefits and organized exhibitions of their own: Basle in 1960, Rotterdam in 1962, and Vienna in 1964, each discussed in later chapters. Originally, these exhibitions were designed mainly as platforms for presentation of gardening products and served as forums for international horticultural contacts at a professional level; they generally attracted between seven and ten million visitors expectant of information and entertainment. Since the 1980s, however, these traditional themes have been supplanted with new considerations. Today, the garden show is seen as much more than a forum for the horticulture industry. Displays of garden art and architecture, technology and ecology, regional and cultural assets, not to mention gastronomy, typically abound.