From seed to sapling

by Michael J. DeCicco

The show creators describe the festival as a one-of-a-kind event blending a flower and garden show with a harvest festival. It’s also a reunion of sorts. For 24 years, award-winning garden designer Michelle Sousa Peay of Metamorphosis Design and her husband, Brian, a restoration carpenter, participated in the Providence Flower and Garden show. Michelle created two Boston Flower and Garden show entrance gardens depicting that year’s show theme, and the couple created Rhode Island Garden Show entrance gardens for 15 years.

When the garden shows ended because of the owners’ retirement, it became the couple’s mission to continue creating such shows because they had built such a family of talented people. Not only gardeners, but also tradesmen and operations and ticketing.

“Folks in our region have also been missing the Harvest Festival that took place 20 years ago,” Michelle Sousa Peay said. “Fall is such a beautiful time of year to create this event. We wanted to keep the magic going.” 

“We are working with many of the gardeners from the Rhode Island Spring Flower and Garden show who are from the South Coast,” Brian Peay said. “We’ll have professionally designed gardens, fall floral arrangements, creative scarecrows made by local artists and businesses, an antique tractor display and procession each day, garden talks, and demos. There will be vintage fishing boats on display, live music, local food vendors, and an artisan/farmer marketplace. There will be two live owl programs by Eyes on Owls, and an interactive kids garden and sensory garden for show visitors to enjoy.” 

Michelle said setting the event for the weekend of the Full Harvest Super Moon was carefully planned. “We are celebrating the harvest from land and sea,” she said. “We are so blessed to be centered in the South Coast region where the farmland meets the ocean. What we offer will reflect that.”

In February, the couple brought the idea to the Westport Executive Fairground Committee, which approved the project as the show falls in line with their mission to promote agriculture. “We’ve been going gangbusters getting it organized ever since,” she said. “We linked up with local gardeners and gardeners we’ve worked with before. And everyone has stepped right up.”

But flowers and garden plants will not be the festival’s only feature she emphasized. The event will also be displaying antique and vintage tractors and boats provided by the local fisherman and farmers, and it will be offering an artisan marketplace for a selection of local handmade goods. 

Michelle lists a variety of local food vendors, offering fish and chips, clam chowder and cakes, barbeque, gourmet grill cheese, apple pie, and cinnamon rolls made on-site along with apple cider donuts and cider. 

There will be garden talks and demonstrations on topics such as pollinator gardens, beekeeping, mushroom log inoculation, herbs for kids. a live owl program, artist Richard Kaiser carving a giant pumpkin, and a kids’ interactive corner.

The latter, she said, is part of their mission to “promote horticulture and agriculture to the next generation. We need to inspire and educate people to support local farms. We need to keep the farms in the Farm Coast. 

“We need get folks to step away from the computer to enjoy nature and want to garden and farm,” she said. “Our kids’ corner is designed to do that. Children will have the opportunity to dig and plant and harvest from the earth. We need to get their attention and pull them in so in their own lives they will connect the dots in a different way as to how horticulture and agriculture are important to all of us.” 

Brian and Michelle Sousa Peay call this year’s festival an inaugural event that they hope will continue for years to come. A Garden Illumination Preview Party has been scheduled for September 28 (a portion of the proceeds benefiting the Westport Fair Agricultural Scholarship Fund). For more information visit southcoastharvestfestival.com. Search Eventbrite.com for tickets.