Outside

And it is. Busch Gardens Europe occupies 117 acres, offering Weldon and her 50-strong gardening team plenty of room in which to work some horticultural magic. Much of the park property is covered with flower gardens that vary in size and floral composition, and often serve to accentuate the themes of nearby rides or venues. Vast is the word: Once springtime’s 50,000 tulips fade, they’re replaced (in early May, after the frost date) by sublime swaths of annuals—begonias, geraniums, petunias, lantana and annual salvias—for the peak summer season, where some 60,000 flowers are in bloom every day. Come autumn, chrysanthemums hold sway.

As one might imagine, sustaining the picture-perfect vision takes a huge amount of hard work by the landscaping crew, but it is accompanied by the satisfaction that comes from meeting some rather unique challenges. Among them: preventing deer and other animals from eating the plants and, of course, keeping all the flowers and shrubs watered during the summer.

It all requires an early start. At 6:00 a.m. every morning, a phalanx of workers in utility scooters, each carting a 100-gallon watering tank, fans out across the property. Their job is to spray the immense number of window boxes and other floral containers at Busch, which cannot be handled by the automatic systems that serve the in-ground beds.

Not surprisingly, it takes some in-house production help to keep Busch Gardens looking spectacular. There is a 17,000-square foot greenhouse on the property, in which 30,000 annuals are grown each year along with 200 large hanging baskets and 400 container plants. The greenhouse enables the staff to replace the annuals in bloom on the property about six times a year. As Weldon notes, even with plenty of care, flowers begin to look a little ragged after a few weeks in the summer heat.

And the work is year-round. In early fall, the chrysanthemums are bedded out; not long after, the tulip bulbs must be planted, and then in the spring, before the park opens, 4,800 cubic yards of mulch must be spread, among other tasks. It’s a Herculean job, but necessary to keep the colors dazzling and the fragrances sweet between late March, when the park opens, and the closing date of October 28. And, of course, the soaring scenery befits this land of colossal characters and grand imagination.