Once upon a time ... a very clever Scottish woman wrote a book about a boy wizard-wannabe with big, round glasses and knobby knees.

        She waved her magic pen and — poof — it turned into a series of Harry Potter best-sellers that spun off everything from movies to trinkets.

At Delhi Flower & Garden Store, Tim Young shows off a deer made from status and grasses, part of the elaborate Wizard¹s Garden. (Dick Swaim photo) | ZOOM |

        Now, a crew from Delhi Flower & Garden is working its own kind of magic to open the boy-wizard's world to visitors of this year's Cincinnati Flower Show in the exhibit“From Mortals to Wizards: A Magical Odyssey.”

        The enchanted garden, about 2,500 square feet of show space, will start at the boy's uncle's house, then twist and turn through settings familiar to the book's fans: a castle, a gamekeeper's cottage, a playing field and a forbidden forest.

        Wanderers will recognize an owl made of birch bark, a unicorn fashioned from dried status and ornamental grasses, a sinewy cat topiary with a Spanish moss coat and a dragon hatchling of baby tears (a plant similar to baby's breath).

        The man who conjured up the plan is Delhi landscaper Tim Young. He is leading a band of five planners, four floral designers and four landscapers to bring the book to bloom.

        Before the planning started, everyone read the first book, promptly got hooked on the tales, and proceeded through the second, third and fourth, imagining in green along the way.

        “The original concept stayed the same, but as we read, we added things and ended up with very wonderful ideas,” Mr. Young says.

        “The maze was an add-on because we found that in the fourth book. And we changed where some of the characters were located in the exhibit. Like the rat, who was originally in the magic school, ends up by the willow. That's a significant part of the story, so we moved him over there.

        Delhi owner Bob Maddux, also part of the design team, wanted to do something fun for children.

        To get them involved in the exhibit, Delhi secretary and chief organizer Lorinda Niemi designed a pamphlet with a quiz for kids to take as they go through the display.

        Part of the fun for the design team was choosing the plants.

        “Lots of the plants,” Mr. Young says, are reminiscent of magic: pink lightning astilbe, wizard coleus, invincible hosta, fairy rose, black dragon coleus, sawtooth oak, fire and ice hosta and a skeleton key and black velvet tiarella.

        “Doing this was right up our alley. We like to do "fun' gardens that are fanciful,” Mr. Young says. At last year's Cincinnati Flower Show, the Delhi team won a best-of-show award for its Alice in Wonderland exhibit.

        Ù Mr. Young estimates the Wizard exhibit includes six major trees, about 150 other trees and shrubs (including roses), 200-300 perennials and about 2,000-3,000 annuals and groundcovers.

        The project includes buildings with faux bricks so authentic-looking that last year, a mason asked where they got the brick. The Delhi staff does all the stenciling, building design and construction.

        The Wizard project started the first week of December when the group began reading the books and making preliminary drawings. They met every two weeks and appended their list of plants and buildings.

        “We've had so many people involved — from nursery workers to the wholesale division — working very hard to procure the right plants. I bounced a lot of ideas off them,” Mr. Young says.

        The project hasn't been without its curses. The recent spate of warm weather threatened to wreak havoc with the team's plans. Azaleas and other plants basking in the greenhouse got too warm and had to be moved to a walk-in cooler to slow the blooming. And the flowers intended to cover the dragon hatchling are not progressing as Mr. Young would like.

        By the time the show opens, Mr. Young guesses his team will have spent $35,000-$40,000 on the Wizard exhibit, including labor.

        “But it will be worth it when you see people, especially the children, go through and their eyes light up,” he says. “Definitely worth the work.”

Ault Park adorned
Artists, floral designers join forces for show
2000 Cincinnati exhibit to be at Chelsea in May
Concert review
From the pages of Harry Potter
Gardening without chemicals
Plant a burst of summer color
Herb project satisfies all the senses
To do this week
Get to it