“When the world wearies and society fails to satisfy, there is always the garden.” – Minnie Aumonier
The world can make us a little weary these days, but fortunately, here in Philadelphia, we can find much to be joyous about. Our beloved Eagles united the city in celebration and the cold weather seems to be abating, but if you still need a little mood boost, the Philadelphia Flower Show is the perfect pick-me-up. Globally renowned for its breathtaking floral displays, garden landscapes and premier plant and botanical art competitions, this year’s show — “Gardens of Tomorrow” — invites you to “explore the future through the eyes of visionary designers, expert gardeners and passionate green enthusiasts as they merge nature’s brilliance with human ingenuity.” For this week’s Portrait, I spoke to one of those passionate green enthusiasts, Bex Claire Hamell, who describes themself as a swamp monster, plant whisperer and grower and purveyor of weird plants. Some responses have been edited for length or clarity.
Where did you bloom?
I grew up in a small town called Ringwood in northern New Jersey — and I mean, north, north New Jersey, bordering New York State. I guess you would call it exurban. It’s not rural. There’s no farmland there, but there’s a lot of watershed for reservoirs and state park land. In fact, you can see New York City from my hometown, because it’s pretty hilly, but it is a world away. There are so many different sides to New Jersey and most people don’t realize that there are such rural or wooded areas because all they think about is what you see from the turnpike.
Do you have siblings?
I have a younger brother. He’s three years younger than me, and we are very close. He actually lived with me for a couple years recently and he was one of my favorite housemates of all time.
Nice. What did your folks do?
My dad was a cop and loved literature, loved to read. My mom started out as a music therapist, and then she switched to being a K-8 music teacher. They both encouraged my brother and me to pursue any creative things we were interested in, as long as they were budget-friendly. So my brother played in the youth orchestra and I got to take pottery classes.
What other things were you into as a younger person?
I spent a lot of time running around in the woods near our house, and the New Jersey Botanical Garden, which is in my hometown. I was a junior counselor at ecology day camp, and junior counselor at space camp. I was in band and I also did drama, especially the behind-the-scenes stuff like painting scenery or doing stage makeup.
What instrument did you play in band?
I played the trumpet mainly, but I also dabbled a little in French horn. Then I switched to the euphonium, which was really fun. If you can play the trumpet, you can play the euphonium. They’re very similar, but it’s got a really nice, really beautiful lower sound.
What did you want to be when you grew up?
I had no idea. But I looked at a lot of adults and what they were doing, and I was like, “I don’t want that.”
So you did the negative, what you didn’t want to be.
Yeah, and there was a point where I was like, “I just don’t want to work in a cubicle.” [Laughing] But there was a point where after some other jobs, I was really grateful for that cubicle.
So why space camp? Did you want to be an astronaut?
In some ways, yes. But then the Challenger disaster happened and that really stuck with me. After that, I was like, “I don’t think I’m brave enough to be an astronaut.”
That could put a damper on it. Did you go on to higher learning?
Yeah, I went to Rutgers, like many people from New Jersey do. I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to study, and I graduated with a degree in visual art and English. But I really took advantage of being at a big university, and took a lot of different classes, [like] physics [and] history.
Before we get into the Philadelphia Flower Show, what are you working on outside of the show?
My background is in communications, marketing and graphic design. I’ve also done some community organizing. I love learning new things and putting them to use. I’m actually working on starting my own specialty nursery right now. So I am trying to go pro in horticulture.
Fabulous. What got you started down the horticultural route.
I’ve always loved plants and my aunt, my dad’s sister, was always really passionate about plants, especially Gesneriads, which is in the African violet family, and begonias. She sent me off to college with some African violets which are not something that most of the college kids had in their dorm rooms. I was able to find people in college who shared my interests. College students who were involved in the community garden. My aunt also got my mom really into plants so it’s always been around me.
But in around 2012, I had a freak accident and it led to discovering all these other underlying health problems so I was really limited in what I could do for a while. Just being with the plants and kind of being tuned into them, being on a totally different rhythm and time scale than usual was really important during that time.
I’m sure.
I was also doing some outdoor gardening. But in 2017, I wound up having a major spinal surgery. And while I was recovering from that, I really got into houseplants because my world was very small at that point. Physically small, but having all these living things around me and watching them grow or not grow, making more of them, and propagating them was really important for me at that time. And since then, it stayed a really central part of my life. A lot of my good friends right now are people I met through the plant world.
So do you have any of those original plants from your aunt, or did you kill them off?
That is an excellent question, and I do still have a bunch of them, and I also have killed some of them off. But one of the beautiful things about having plant friends is that I was able to give cuttings, or babies of those plants to friends. My mom also has duplicates of some of them so if I kill something off, I can ask for a cutting and then I have that plant again!
Sounds almost like when Barbra Streisand had her dogs cloned! Do you mind sharing what the accident was? You said it was a freak accident.
Well, I was volunteering at an animal shelter, and I was running with the dogs to help them get their energy out. One dog yanked me while she was on leash, and I partially dislocated my sacroiliac joint, where the spine connects to the pelvis.
Ouch!
After that, I found out that I had a genetic disorder called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS). So I’ve had a lot of mysterious medical problems all my life. Finally, when I was 30, we figured it all out. But before that, I was very deep in trying to treat them and get back to a certain level of functionality.
What is Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome?
It’s a hereditary connective tissue disorder that affects collagen metabolism. So it both creates instability in the joints, which leads to premature, degenerative joint disease, and it also comes with cardiac complications and gastrointestinal complications and immune complications. I guess I’m unlucky in that I have all of those, but I am lucky that they’ve been very treatable for me. Not everyone responds to treatment, but I luckily did.
Thanks for sharing that. Maybe somebody will read this and think, “Oh, maybe that’s what I have.”
Oh, totally. They used to say it was rare, but now they’re realizing it was just rarely diagnosed. Looking back on my medical records from when I was a kid, it’s basically describing the exact diagnostic criteria for EDS, but they didn’t know it. That was before the internet was really widespread.
It’s good to know there’s some good things that come out of the internet.
For sure, I mean I’ve learned so much about plants through people I’ve met on social media, and made some really good friends that way.
What’s the strangest plant you own, and what’s the strangest plant you’ve heard of? I know there are some freaky plants out there that have some strange habits.
Well, the best freaky or exotic plants out there are the carnivorous plants. They’re not great indoor plants, but I grow Pinguicula, also known as butterworts and those are these cute, tiny rosettes with a sticky surface that acts like a natural fly paper. They come in different bright colors and their flowers are pollinated by hummingbirds, and they’re pretty freaky.
I also specialize in blue plants. Blue is one of the rarest colors in nature. It’s very hard for animals or plants to produce blue pigments. There are certain plants from tropical areas that have special structures that create a blue color, similar to the way a bird’s feathers work. It helps them collect more light. So I’ve got these humidity-loving, shade-loving, bright-blue ferns and they’re just one of my favorite things. Nothing else looks like them.
How did you get involved with the Philadelphia Flower Show?
I’ve been going to the Philadelphia Flower Show with my mom more or less since I moved to Philadelphia in 2006. The Horticourt, which is the part where I compete, was always my favorite part. It’s all individual plants from different people. I was really into seeing what people were growing in their homes or greenhouses. I’d think, “I have a plant like that.” But it didn’t really occur to me to compete. Then I had a friend who I’d met on Instagram, who I did begonia things with and she competed one year. She told me that I should compete and I was like, “Oh, I don’t know,” until she told me that you got free tickets, and that was what put me over the edge. Now that’s certainly not the only reason I compete. My friend tried to convince me to compete in 2020, literally a week before everything closed down, so I spent the next two years planning out what I was going to do when I was able to enter in 2022.
How did you do that first year?
Really well! I surprised myself pleasantly.
I read that you got a blue ribbon for “cactus grown in a house or office.” I didn’t realize how many different smaller categories they offer.
I love how granular the categories get. It gives us more opportunities to win blue ribbons. Also, for new competitors, it can be really daunting to think that you’re competing with professional growers with greenhouses etc., so the categories like “plants grown in houses or offices” are less intimidating.
One of my favorite parts is reading the comments from the judges. Some of them get pretty snarky! I always have a British voice in my mind when I read them.
Sheer perfection! I can’t think of any snarky comments I’ve gotten off hand. But you only get judging comments for plants that win rosettes. That means the best of the best of a class. At that point, you’re only getting nice comments. Before I ever entered, I found reading the judges’ comments really helpful for me to kind of get inside the mind of a judge. To figure out what they were looking for. It’s beyond just growing like a nice plant that’s alive and healthy. There’s a lot of littler things they’re looking for, kind of like the difference between, say, my dog and a National Kennel Club dog.
You started with the Philadelphia Flower Show, but I was surprised to see how many other flower and plant competition shows we have in this area. I didn’t know there were so many.
Yeah, neither did I. I’ve been to some county fairs as a kid, and I loved seeing all the produce people grow, and jams and flowers and everything. I love that stuff. I guess I didn’t know about it because my aunt was involved in a plant society but she wasn’t into the showing aspect of things. She just liked having them and propagating them and sharing her plants.
I got involved in the American Begonia Society because that’s where all the like-minded Begonia Greeks are. One of our president’s goals was to have an American Begonia Society-sanctioned show. I was on the team for that. We had our second one last year, and we’re planning for our third one this year. It’s really fun. I just love when people want me to talk about plants. I could do that forever.
Before we move on to the Philadelphia Flower Show, tell me a little bit about your coming-out journey.
When you’re nonbinary and/or bisexual, coming out isn’t a one-time thing. It’s something that you have to do again and again and again. And sometimes I wonder, if I haven’t corrected someone about my pronouns, does that mean I’m back in the closet? I don’t think so. I think it just means that I don’t always want to talk about my gender with random people when I’m trying to talk about something else.
I had to come out a couple times because the language just wasn’t there. I knew there was something going on with my gender but we didn’t really talk about nonbinary in the ’90s. It wasn’t until I hit college and read “Gender Trouble” in 2003 that I started to have the language to talk about myself. I am extremely lucky. I have friends who are estranged from their families. Families who didn’t accept them. But even when my family hasn’t always understood, they’ve always accepted me.
What’s a fun family memory or tradition?
I will give you two. When we were kids, my parents were very crunchy. So we did a lot of family camping together. We would load up the minivan, drive up to Bar Harbor in Maine, and camp out there for a week, which was a ton of fun. Everything smells like pine trees and the ocean, it’s really nice. My dad passed in 2013 and now I guess I would say my mom and my brother and I have a very dynamic way with each other. We like to play and trash talk each other. We like to make fun of each other, always gently of course, but my mom and brother always drag me when I kill my plants.
My family is the same. So let’s talk about what you’re doing at the Philadelphia Flower Show this year.
[Laughing] What am I doing? Way too much! I’m entering some plants in the Horticourt. I am helping to work on the exhibits — the educational exhibits for the Delaware Valley branch of the American Begonia Society and the Indoor Plant Society. I will be judging for a special begonia ribbon and the new Indoor Plant Society ribbon, which we introduced last year. Last year was our first year to recognize the best of the plants grown in the house or office. We want to encourage new competitors and competitors who might be living in apartments or row houses.
I will also be giving a talk on Tuesday about house plant habitats. So we’re going to be taking a look at the wild origins and ecological niches that a lot of popular houseplants occupy. Whenever someone tells me to do something, I want to know why. So this is going to kind of get into the why behind a lot of plant care advice. We’re going to look at why certain plants need less water, why certain plants need more water, why they need less or more light and we’re going to look at some surprising things too.
I’m excited. What’s a favorite memory from the Philadelphia Flower Show?
I can’t really think of any one memory that stands out to me. I just love seeing all my friends from year to year. I’ve really made some friends at the Philadelphia Flower Show. I guess one of my favorite things about it is how it makes me a better grower. Growing the plants for the show is different from growing them for yourself at the house just for you to enjoy. I specialize in small plants, starter plants, plants that someone can buy, and then they get to grow up big. They’re rare plants and kind of slow growing so this is an affordable way to buy them or sell them.
I’m all about the starter plant. I don’t have the patience for seeds. I like to see the growth right away.
I also find it so satisfying to get a little bit of plant and grow it huge. But I have been getting into seeds more lately, just because it’s a great way to access plants that you might not be able to buy and I have kind of rare tastes these days.
Cool, so let’s get to some totally random questions. I’ve made a lot of them plant-based for you. What type of music would you sing or play for your plants?
Oh, we listen to a lot of disco together. We have a plant-watering dance party.
Favorite plant-based place to hang out in the Philadelphia region.
Chanticleer. It’s this incredible garden out in Radnor. What I like about it is that it’s not a huge property, but the cool plants are so dense there. You can do it in a couple hours, but after those couple hours, you’re gonna have seen so much awesome and different stuff. It’s just perfect.
I grew up near there. So many little hidden nooks there, and it’s not expensive, which is nice.
If you are in the landscape industry or a garden professional, it’s free, and if you have a SNAP card, it’s only $2. Members of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society get a discount too.
Or if you have a Radnor library card. What’s something that you wish you had learned?
I’m always learning, just trying to become a better horticulturist and learn how to grow new kinds of plants, but outside of the plant world? I wish I could do carpentry. There’s always things I would like to build and I can’t do that. To make that raised bed myself, or make some built-in bookshelves. But that is not a skillset I have.
I was reading about all that goes into propagating and saw terms like, asexual reproduction, fertilizing the ovaries, maturity, etc. [Laughing] So do you now feel qualified to be a midwife?
Ha! Only a plant midwife! Actually, my mom was a natural childbirth instructor when I was a kid, and I sat in on all those classes. So even before I knew where babies came from in one way, I knew exactly where babies physically came from because we had these books with 3D models of the baby coming out of the birth canal.
Do you have any pets?
Yes, I have a dog and a cat. The cat is Pants, short for Margarita Pantolones. She also goes by Maggie Pants or Large Marge. And my dog is June Bug. They’re both weird old ladies.
Aren’t June bugs bad for plants?
They can be, but she’s not great for plants either. She doesn’t go after them, but she certainly doesn’t let them stand in her way if she’s trying to get somewhere.
Are you a vegetarian or a meat eater? And if you’re a vegetarian, do you feel like a cannibal when you eat your greens?
No, I think I don’t feel guilty about eating because that’s what all organisms who aren’t plants got to do. Plants can make their own food, but the rest of us got to eat something else. I was actually raised vegetarian and started eating meat in my 20s and 30s, but now I’m kind of at the point where I cook vegetarian for myself, but I’m not going to turn down meat if I’m at someone’s house and it’s offered. Occasionally, I’ll go to the halal cart by my house and get a combo platter.
Plants lead me to fertilizer, which leads me to what do you think happens when we die?
Oh, we’re getting deep now! I wish I knew, but I don’t have any conclusive answers, and I am suspicious of anyone who says they do. But I definitely think about what happens to our plants after our deaths. Many of the plants my aunt left behind had no tags or faded tags, and my mom and I are still trying to identify them. So I label my plants pretty obsessively! I’m really into my label maker.
What is something at the Philadelphia Flower Show that really moved you?
In my first year competing, two of the Sinningias I had originally gotten from my aunt won special awards for “Best Flowering Gesneriad” and I literally cried.
Awww. My last question is, do you have a favorite motto?
Always be propagating!
The Philadelphia Flower Show runs March 1-9 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, 1101 Arch St. For more information, visit phsonline.org/the-flower-show.