Like many women, Betty Ann Galway inherited a passion for flowers and gardening from her mom.
Galway, 51, grew up in suburban Baltimore and Virginia Beach, where she'd pick dandelions, buttercups and violets from the family's extensive garden.
Her mother, Betty Jo Schellenberg, a homemaker and talented singer, had a green thumb and a heart of gold. Schellenberg died last July at age 79.
"She always let me pick whatever I wanted in the yard," she said. "And she let me use any vase I wanted."
So it's fitting that "Celebrating the Seasons," this year's standard flower show by the Tidewater District of the Virginia Federation of Garden Clubs, is on Mother's Day weekend.
"I truly credit my mom for my love of flowers and nature," said Galway, a prize-winning floral arranger, Virginia Beach resident and instructor at Norfolk Botanical Garden, where the flower show will be held.
"She taught me to see nature. So many people don't pay attention to the beauty and wonder surrounding them. She gave me the gift and joy of really seeing it."
Galway is passing on that gift, not only to her students but also to her daughter, Carla Ryan. Both women will compete in the show, where novice and seasoned designers submit floral arrangements in a variety of categories, including traditional designs, table settings, even jewelry that incorporates fresh or dried blossoms.
Last month, Ryan and about a dozen other women attended her mother's floral design class at the botanical garden, where Galway is lifelong-learning program manager.
Dressed in a bright blue outfit, with a tumble of sunflower-blond hair, Galway demonstrated how to make a country basket of tulips in vivid yellows, pinks and purples.
The women busied themselves at worktables, snipping stems and poking them through a chunk of wet floral foam inside their baskets. They dipped small brushes into a bowl of egg whites and painted the tulips' inner petals to glue the buds into tidy submission.
As Galway lectured, a volunteer brought armfuls of coral bell honeysuckles, Lady Banks roses, snowball viburnum and other flowers and greenery to their tables.
"This is just a little happy green filler," Galway said of some dangly hellebores that had gone to seed. "Go ahead and put this throughout your arrangement."
Occasionally, she wandered among the tables to offer advice and encouragement.
"I would put another viburnum, maybe even two - one here and one here," she told one student.
To another, who was making an arrangement to be viewed from all sides: "That's OK. Even when you make a 360, there's always one side that looks better than the other."
Ryan, a 27-year-old married schoolteacher, has a new respect for her mom's floral expertise.
"Now, having my own home and wanting it to be decorated, I appreciate it more," she said. "I'd be happy if it wasn't a dying art."
It's not just an art. Galway and others have made flowers their business, too.
She has been in the industry for three decades, working in retail and wholesale, teaching workshops, running a floral wedding business and developing a design certificate program at the garden. Galway even did the flowers for her own wedding in 1985.
Historically, the flower show is held earlier in the year as part of the annual Mid-Atlantic Home & Garden Show. However, it found a new home in Norfolk after some financial uncertainty uprooted it from Virginia Beach.
"Lo and behold, (the botanical garden) said yes, you can have it, and we're not going to charge you, because you're an educational group," said Tidewater District President Frances Thrash.
The flower show, which coincides with the garden's annual plant sale, will be even more colorful because it's held in the spring.
"We're going to have lots of blooming things, lots of color," Thrash said.
And the location couldn't be more appropriate, especially for Galway, whose mother's memorial service was held in Rose Garden Hall.
Last June, barely two weeks before she died of a heart attack, Schellenberg was busy in her yard, cutting two bags of pittosporum - an evergreen shrub - to decorate the stage for Maya Angelou's garden-sponsored talk at Chrysler Hall.
"She came straight from the garden in her old jeans, one of Dad's old long-sleeved dress shirts and rubber boots, her usual gardening attire - apologizing that she didn't change first, but wanted to bring the greens as soon as possible," Galway said.
"Little did she know that the two large urns... would remain green and be present at her celebration."
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If you go
What "Celebrating the Season: A Standard Flower Show," sponsored by the Tidewater District of the Virginia Federation of Garden Clubs
Where Norfolk Botanical Garden, Rose Garden Hall, 6700 Azalea Garden Road, Norfolk
When 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Sunday
Cost Show is free with admission to Norfolk Botanical Garden: $11 for adults, $10 seniors/military, $9 youth and free for garden members and toddlers under 2.
BRANCHING OUT
It's held over Mother's Day weekend, but this is not necessarily your mother's flower show.
"Celebrating the Season: A Standard Flower Show," sponsored by the Tidewater District of the Virginia Federation of Garden Clubs, shows how flower shows have evolved over the years.
Garden clubs have increasingly introduced nontraditional categories at these events, inspiring some unconventional flower arrangements.
"Creative" designs, unlike their traditional counterparts, are the Picassos of the floral-arranging scene.
"They use dried pieces of wood, they use plastic pieces, they use metal; the container itself might be rather elaborate," said Susan Porter, show chairwoman.
Betty Ann Galway, lifelong-learning program manager at Norfolk Botanical Garden and a longtime floral designer in Virginia Beach, has heard of bedpans used as containers.
"I seriously think it started at least by the '70s," she said. "I have one of my mom's old calendars, and it had some weird stuff in it. They were trying to break out."
Still, art remains in the eye of the beholder.
Frances Thrash, president of the Tidewater District of the Virginia Federation of Garden Clubs, frowns on "shock value." She recalled an entry in which the designer installed deer antlers through a broken windshield and then simulated dripping blood with red anthuriums.
Other categories this year include jewelry, table settings (with place mats and dinnerware) and even underwater designs. There's also a new youth category for designers 18 and under.
Leslie Lampella, an NBG volunteer and retired operations research analyst, is trying her hand at a petite arrangement. New to floral arranging, she was surprised by all the entries.
"I'm looking for traditional flowers in a vase, but it was astounding the different types of things they had," she said. "They had tiny little 3-inch vases with stuff stuck in them. They had table settings. It's crazy."