Hundreds of large exhibition English mums are set to take over Volunteer Park Conservatory this weekend, as the Evergreen Chrysanthemum Association stages its annual fall show from Friday through Sunday. The nonprofit garden club is marking 79 years of growing, showing and promoting exhibition chrysanthemums in the Pacific Northwest, and the association says its cultivars are seldom available at garden nurseries or flower shops.
The show runs Friday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. The conservatory's 2024 calendar placed it inside the Seasonal House and Priebe Wing at the conservatory, according to volunteerparkconservatory.org. Visitors who show up expecting a typical grocery-store bouquet are in for a surprise: the association's growers cultivate roughly 150 chrysanthemum varieties, many of which are rarely available at nurseries or flower shops, per the conservatory's own calendar listing.
West Seattle Nursery says admission and parking for the Volunteer Park show are free.
A Nonprofit Rooted in Pacific Northwest Horticulture
The Evergreen Chrysanthemum Association describes itself as an amateur, nonprofit garden club founded in 1947, according to the conservatory's calendar page. The club's own history, published on the Evergreen Chrysanthemum Association website, traces its roots to a group of men who split off from the Seattle Chrysanthemum Society that year to form their own organization. The bylaws later changed in 1998 to allow women to join, opening membership beyond its original founders.
Collectively, the club's members now grow more than 200 different cultivars, the association notes on its site. That figure sits alongside the conservatory's separate estimate of roughly 150 varieties grown by members, though the dossier does not clarify whether the two numbers describe the same group of growers or different counts. Either way, the breadth of varieties is central to the club's pitch: these are plants that, as the association puts it, are seldom available at garden nurseries or in flower shops.
A Show With Decades of Local History
The association typically holds its fall chrysanthemum show at the end of October each year, according to the club's history page, and this year's three-day run continues that long-standing pattern. The group traces the regional tradition even further back, noting that the first exhibition chrysanthemum show in Vancouver was held in October 1935 and was considered a huge success at the time. A year earlier, in 1934, a Vancouver exhibition chrysanthemum display reportedly earned a gold-medal certificate, part of the deeper regional history the club highlights in its own materials.
Volunteer Park Conservatory has hosted the show before — the association's fall flower show was held there on Oct. 27, 2023, according to a listing from the University of Washington, which described that year's show as featuring hundreds of unique blooms in a wide range of colors, shapes and sizes. Other regional garden retailers have promoted this year's show in similar terms. Sunnyside Nursery describes the 2026 event as a breathtaking showcase of exhibition chrysanthemums in full bloom.
The conservatory's 2024 listing invited visitors to talk with ECA members about the regional history of chrysanthemums, giving that year's show an educational bent alongside the visual spectacle.
