Disney’s parks are known for their magic, but a lot of overnight work goes into casting the spell of the Epcot International Flower & Garden Festival.

“Most of our installation does happen in the dead of night,” said Heather Will-Browne, a horticulture manager at the Disney Nursery. “Gardeners will come in as early as midnight and work all night long.”

Even now — the festival opened Thursday and runs through June 3 — the work is not done. Crews must keep the glorious flower fields, hanging plants, flower towers and other exhibits thriving. They must maintain complex topiaries. And as April wanes and Florida’s summer attains full steam, many spring plants will be swapped out for more heat-tolerant flowers.

The topiaries are among the most challenging and impressive features in Epcot’s displays, which have a pirate theme this year.

“We have to start way in advance, because it takes a long time to create these kind of topiary,” said Eric Darden, horticulture manager with the festival. Yes, it’s a year-round job; the staff is already planning designs for next year’s event.

“We actually knew last June that we were going to theme pirates and princesses,” he said. “We knew that our front entrance was going to be Captain Hook, Peter Pan, Tinker Bell and Crocodile on a topiary ship in the main entrance bed.”

And Mickey and Minnie, the topiaries that appear every year, had to be transformed from picnic poses and attire into a pirate and a princess, along with Donald Duck, Pluto and other characters.

“It takes several months to modify the frames, work with our artist at Disney to make sure that the characters that we’re creating out of plants actually looks like the characters that our guests expect to see,” Darden said.

Anatomy of a topiary

The giant Mickey is marvelously complex, and completely decorated in plant material. His coat is made of Joseph’s Coat; his legs, living moss; his face and hands, dried moss; his boots and belt, coconut fiber; his flag, dried statis; and his ears, ficus.

Inside, bubblers keep the plants alive, so the topiary team doesn’t have to hand-water the figures. During the festival, the team will give them an occasional haircut.

Recently at Disney’s greenhouses, workers still doused the topiaries with hoses. Pluto’s mouth dripped clear water, a happy doggie drool. But it’s the pipes inside that run extra water to the parts that tend to dry out faster, such as the arms and legs.

“That’s really allowed us to get aggressive with the sizes and numbers of topiaries that we produce, plus it’s a more reliable watering system,” Darden said. “As you know from your house, if you miss watering a potted plant one day, you’ve got to start over. Well, it’s the same with a topiary. If you don’t water an arm once, you’re going to be replanting that. The internal system helps get it wetter.”

After the festival, some of the topiaries, especially Mickey and Minnie, will be maintained in pristine condition for special appearances throughout the year.

Around the greenhouses, metal skeletons of characters that won’t be used in this year’s festival await their next assignment. And one artist worked on a delicate Tinker Bell topiary only half his size, preparing her to alight on the pirate ship heading to Epcot.

“I think my favorite part’s going to be the main entrance this year,” Darden said.

Riot of color

Will-Browne’s job is all about color. “I’m the flower lady,” she said.

Delivering all that color to Epcot is the biggest challenge: 45 flower towers brimming with pink and white impatiens, lots of hanging baskets, 70,000 bedding plants for the flower fields alone, and 700 varied containers.

Will-Browne was the first female gardener at Walt Disney World, and this may very well be her dream job. “I am really into plants,” she said. “I’ve loved plants my whole life.”

Her favorite part of preparing for the festival is the tweaking that must be done. After all, plants are living creatures, and they don’t always behave according to plan.

As she walks through the greenhouses, she points out a row of hanging baskets filled with a miniature garden of plants destined for the France area of Epcot.

“We’re holding our breath, because this little blue scutellaria has not started to flower yet,” Will-Browne said. “So sometimes you have to make last-minute changes, and this may be one of them.”

Some of the flower containers are unusual. A big, triangular vessel that looks kind of like a warped rowboat is actually a pizza slice, filled with plants that give pizza its flavor.

Hay bales drip with floral color, too, after a struggle to get the plants and the bales to play nice. Workers ended up using a large drill to make holes for the pots, since simple digging was impossible in the dense blocks.

Other containers are more conventional. Bright colors fill the pots heading to the Canada area. More subtle pastels glow in the Norway pots. Morocco will feature some unusual plants, including lentils and garbanzo beans. Pretty cacti and orchid “trees” will populate Mexico.

“Everything has a place and a purpose,” Will-Browne said.

One of the most interesting container-garden concepts is the scent collections in France. Some mimic perfumes with their beautiful, delicious plants, including ginger, sage, peppers and more.

The gardeners couldn’t get the tobacco they wanted, so they use a pretty flowering plant with a similar scent, a variety of nicotiana, in its place.

Will-Browne walks the aisles between the greenhouses, pinching off brown bits and murmuring over a few wilty blooms.

“This is the last-minute tweaking,” she said. It’s clear that she loves it.

Contact Kridler at 242-3633 or ckridler@floridatoday.com. via : www.floridatoday.com