All About the Flowers of Flower & Food Festival 2023

• Amber Davis

You want to know when it’s a beautiful time to be in the Smoky Mountains? In the spring when everything is in bloom! (Okay that was a loaded question—it’s ALWAYS a beautiful time to be in the Smokies, but this is especially true in the spring.)

Dollywood is nestled into the foothills of Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSMNP), and this park is known around the world as one of the best places to enjoy wildflower diversity. There are more than 1500 kinds of flowering plants within GSMNP, and that’s more than any other national park in North America!

Clearly, our community is a great place for flowers to thrive, so Dollywood gets in on the beauty and celebration of blossoms with our Flower & Food Festival (April 21 – June 11).

This blog will tell you all about the flowers of Dollywood’s Flower & Food Festival.

Flowers Fill the Park

Dollywood guests can expect more than half-a-million blooms throughout our 165-acre park. You’ll even enjoy seeing bright and welcoming plants before you even enter through the turnstiles. We pride ourselves on beautiful backdrops in every season, but we punch that up a notch in the springtime. You’ll see more potted flowers, more hanging baskets and more flower beds with tightly-packed color blocks.

While we buy many flowers to fill the park, we also grow some of our own in two greenhouses and a nursery kept on property. All of the hanging baskets you see are our own creation! Our landscaping team of 12 starts working on them in January.

Our larger-than-life Mosaiculture displays will be returning for another year during the festival. Some of these icons stand nearly 15 feet tall! To create these flower structures, we teamed up with a floral design company based in Montreal, Canada. You may be tempted to call them topiaries, but a traditional topiary is a shrub or tree that is clipped into an ornamental shape. Our designs are made up of as many as 6,000 individual plants!

Growing Behind the Scenes

Speaking of those plants in Canada, everything is growing great! Our friends from Mosaiculture sent us some progress pictures. Do you see your favorite display?

Each plug is planted in a specific location within the structure, so that the color and type of plant creates a recognizable feature, like the fuzzy face of a bear or the feathery plume of a peacock.

These displays grow in pieces and have to be disassembled for transportation. Our team will put them back together when they arrive and get them camera-ready by April 21.

Where to Look

Look for these fantastic displays when you visit during the Flower & Food Festival:

Topsy Turvy Umbrella – Showstreet

Dolly’s Mom Sewing the Coat of Many Colors – Rivertown Junction

Beekeeper & Bees – Craftsman’s Valley

Mama Bear & Cubs – Rivertown Junction

Raccoon Family – Rivertown Junction

Mallard Duck – Craftsman’s Valley

Frogs & Turtles – Rivertown Junction

Peacock – Craftsman’s Valley

Mountain Vista – Rivertown Junction

Provided below is a full list of all the flowers to look for throughout the park, not just these festival icons.

Maintenance

At this point, you may be wondering: how do they water all those flowers?! It’s a little manual and a little automated. Our team of 12 works eight hours a day starting at 4 a.m. They hand-water the beds and baskets. (So, maybe it’s actually a LOT manual!) They come in early to get this done before guests arrive. But, there is an app that they can use to control when the Mosaiculture icons are watered. It’s an internal irrigation system within the structure. That’s pretty cool, if you ask me!

There’s also trimming and replacing the Mosaiculture plugs that don’t do well. Our Dollywood team does it all!

List of Flowers

This last section is for the flower nerds! (I say that with no disrespect. I am an aspiring flower nerd.) I’ll list the common name of the flowers you can be on the lookout for and organize it by area of the park. 

Veterans Boulevard and the Dollywood Toll Booths
Vinca
Globe Amaranth

Entry Plaza
Vinca
Sunpatiens
Coleus
Petunia
Diamond Frost
Begonia
Kimberly Fern

Showstreet and Market Square
Vinca
Mealy Cup Sage
Sunpatiens
Coleus
Petunia
Begonia
Lantana
Cock’s Comb
Firecracker Plant
Floss Flower
Marigold
Gold Creeping Jenny
Kimberly Fern
Joseph’s Coat
Dragon’s Tongue
Stonecrop
Million Bells
Bidens Daisy
Cotton Lavender
Creeping Jenny
Verbena
Bugleweed
Green Lavender Cotton
Sweet Potato Vine

Adventures in Imagination
Coleus
Begonia
African Daisy
Verbena
Lantana
Coleus
Verbena
Caladium
Sunpatiens

Jukebox Junction
Coleus
Begonia
African Daisy
Verbena
Lantana
Coleus
Verbena
Caladium
Sunpatiens

Rivertown Junction
Begonia
Egyptian Star-Cluster
Dragon’s Tongue
Stonecrop
Joseph’s Coat
Coleus
Sunpatiens
African Daisy
Kimberly Fern
Mandevilla
Lantana
Fan Flower
Vinca
Mexican Petunia
Summer Snapdragon
Petunia
Gazania African Daisy
Creeping Jenny
Bugleweed
Dichondra
Persian Shield
Hens and Chicks
Water Hyacinth
English Ivy
Peacock Spike-Moss
Gold Creeping Jenny
Mexican Heather

The Village
New Guinea Impatiens
Kimberly Fern
Mealy Cup Sage
African Daisy
Petunia
Egyptian Star-Cluster
Lantana
Globe Amaranth
Mexican Heather
Coleus

Country Fair
Coleus
Mexican Heather
Globe Amaranth
Lantana
Vinca
Marguerite Daisy
Sunpatiens
Firecracker Plant

Craftsman’s Valley
Egyptian Star-Cluster
Sage
Joseph’s Coat
Cotton Lavender
Stonecrop
Dragon’s Tongue
Tall Verbena
Hyssop
Cosmos
Begonia
Vinca
Fountain Grass
Lantana
Petunia
Caladium
Sunpatiens
Summer Snapdragon
Hens and Chicks
Artillery Plant
Globe Amaranth
Kimberly Fern

Owens Farm
Coleus
Sunpatiens
Fan Flower
Sweet Potato Vine

Wilderness Pass
Vinca
Kimberly Fern
Egyptian Star-Cluster
Bidens Daisy

Wildwood Grove
Vinca
Kimberly Fern
Egyptian Star-Cluster
Bidens Daisy