I recently attended the 6th Annual PlantPop Film Festival in Norfolk, Va. and I have a report! So first, I imagine you’re asking: What IS PlantPop exactly?
It’s a Film Production Company
PlantPop is a 10-year-0ld film production company that commissions short films, mostly about interesting people doing cool things with plants – 359 of them so far, with another year’s worth ready to be released. They’re all on the PlantPop YouTube channel except for a few longer films that require a newsletter subscription for access.
So who ARE these people with connections to/obsessions with plants? Growers, illustrators, designers, artists, mostly people I don’t know but quite a few I do (or know OF): Sandy of Sandy’s Plants, Linda Chalker-Scott, Claudia West, Thomas Rainer, Doug Tallamy, Billy Goodnick, Saxon Holt, Loree Bohl, Michael Judd, Lauren Wheeler, Summer Rayne Oakes, Patrick Dougherty, Brent and Becky, Tony Avent, Brie Arthur, and Les Parks.
I asked PlantPop producer Laura Christian how they found these people to feature. “We find our film subjects mostly by word-of-mouth. Writers like yourself are essential for us because you start a topic and we can usually find a person attached. Sometimes it starts with an interest like ‘We’re looking for garden designers. Who do we know?’ But, often it’s me subscribing to news agencies, following Instagram accounts, and watching YouTube videos. I save the stories I think are interesting and if we have a filmmaker in that area I loop them in. If we don’t have a filmmaker in the area, I’ll consider whether or not we can find more stories around there and then find and commission a filmmaker. Often I find filmmakers by posting an ad, but sometimes I reach out directly to filmmakers through their websites or through Vimeo.”
Got Subjects to Suggest?
Click here to suggest an interesting person with some kind of passion for plants that PlantPop might feature. I’ve sent them a few myself. They can be anywhere; PlantPop would find a local filmmaker to do it.
In addition to features about individuals and their plant obsessions (my word), PlantPop produces narration-free field trips about places as far away as Japan and New Zealand and as close as Norfolk (very close to the PlantPop headquarters in Suffolk, Va), portraits, with artists’ drawings, where I saw this one of former GardenRant guest Billy Goodnick, and very interesting guest list films of Brie Arthur chatting up such horticultural luminaries as Carol Reese, Kelly Norris and Marty Ross). And they do time-lapse films, too! (I’ll cover that in a separate post.)
Screen shot of “guest list” film.
Coming up
PlantPop publishes four new short films every month, but there’s more – their first feature-length documentary about daylilies is in post-production, with the working title “Have a Beautiful Day.” Why daylilies? Partly because they open and close in one day, making them perfect subjects for time-release photography. And as executive producer Art Parkerson said in this interview, Daylily Society members are the most “over-the-top loco about their plant of choice” of any group he’s encountered. (And that’s saying a LOT.)
The next major release after that has the working title “How to Look at Flowers.”
What’s their vision?
So now you may be asking: What’s their vision, their goal? I found some answers in the text accompanying their very first video in 2014:
- Here is what we aim to do: explore the intersection of people and plants, the culture of horticulture, if you will, through creative digital media.
- Here is how we will begin: making films about people and plants in our region, and creating elegant time-lapse films of flowers blooming.
- Here is how we will make money: we have no idea. We’ll worry about that later, when we run out of money.
- This is why we are doing it: we believe in the power of plants, that they are utterly beautiful and worthy of our highest efforts to study, understand and appreciate. Our post-modern, digital, information-overloaded culture in which we live dedicates far more attention and artful inspiration toward far less important things than plants. Like what? Don’t get us started. If you need examples, just go back to Facebook (assuming that’s still a thing).
Here’s our ten things:
Plants speak for themselves (but they need a translator).
The conversation is online (so we must be).
The internet is not the answer (but plants are).
Be beautiful (but real).
Don’t be boring (but don’t sensationalize).
Be honest (no buts). Don’t hide.
Useful is overrated.
Pay no attention to view counts.
Flowers not food.
Help others. People are more important than plants.
From what I can tell, 10 years and 359 films on, they’ve stuck by their lofty vision.
Who’s Behind All This?
And “Art’s role as the Executive Producer is to be the visionary for PlantPop. He shares his expectations, encourages and guides the team in the right direction, and he’s the financial backer.
The Patron – Art Parkerson
Screen shot of Art being interviewed on the Garden MasterClass.
Let’s Get Even Nosier
If your next question is: how much does PlantPop cost you, Art? Well, I tried getting an answer for you (and me – I’m nosy, too), to which question Art responded that “The work comes first. The money is just a necessary means to make the work. Everyone who does any work for us gets paid; there are no ‘volunteers.’ So far, we have never charged a fee nor paid a fee to any subject for a film about them. The filmmakers are paid by PlantPop, not by the person they film. We also have not solicited or accepted any sponsorship from a third party for any film. We are very thrifty. I think we maximize value. And we only spend what we have; there is no debt. We’ve had solid financial support for 10 years, and we should continue to have that support to keep the pace we have been at: 4 short films per month.”
He talks about patronage a bit more in this article. And thanks to PlantPop finally being open to publicity, I found this interview of Art by Noel Kingsbury and Annie Guilfoyle for GardenClass. And just this year PlantPop had a booth at the Philadelphia Flower Show and at the GardenComm symposium. Oh, and they invited this garden writer to their film festival!
For more of Art’s writing, check out his column in Grower Talks. Most of it’s too inside-nursery biz for me but his column about the winter party that is the MANTS trade show sure resonated with me.
Growing up as/with Art
Art grew up on the family farm (Lancaster), where he says he lived around art created by an aunt. He “fooled around” with filmmaking and painting in high school, studied information technology at Virginia Tech, came back to run the business at 22, but found he needed a creative outlet. So if you’re the owner of a large, successful wholesale nursery and you’re an artist at heart, it makes total sense to make and celebrate films that celebrate plants and the people who love them.
The Film Festival
Casey Zap, the subject of an award-winning film, attended the festival – and I got to chat with him at our hotel over coffee. He’s colorful in the film AND in person.
I may have mentioned being thrilled to be invited to a PlantPop Film Festival, which this year was a do-able drive from home for me. Other invitees included eight of the winning filmmakers (even one from Europe!), various plantspeople, and local festival-goers, who all gathered at a university planetarium to see the winning films and some eye-popping time-lapse videos. Winners received about $10,000 in prize money.
This year was the first time the festival included not just PlantPop’s own commissioned films but submissions from others, too, and Laura says she was “so inspired by seeing plants in so many different ways. We had a whopping total of 40 submissions, and ten awesome prize-winners.”
During the screening of “The Mint Gardener,” a film about watercolorist Sarah Simon in Seattle, I thought I spied GardenRanter Lorene Edwards Forkner having what looked to be a serious conversation, and she confirmed that she was there – so that was a hoot.
Art talking to festival invitees.
The morning after the screening there was lots more in store for us, including tours of Lancaster Farm and attending a workshop with the filmmakers, the subject of which was “Telling stories about plants” – pretty on-target for a gardenblogger. My take-aways:
That “Helvetica” is considered a model among documentary films, and that it covers not just the common typeface but design writ large. (I watched it here soon after the festival and totally agree.) Others mentioned admiringly were “Truffle Hunters” and “Gaucho Gaucho.”
We were shown clips of the daylily film in progress and asked for our feedback. I suggested that it include mention of the amazing variety in their shapes and colors – something that attracted me back in my daylily-collecting days. My favorite clip was of a Dutch breeder who’d somehow created a daylily that blooms for up to two weeks!
And most interesting to me were the attendees’ suggestions for how PlantPop could generate income in order to, in Art’s words, “grow and give my filmmakers a raise.” He told us about showing the films to garden center owners, who showed no interest in screening them in their stores. I can see their point because I’m either in shopping mode or film-watching mode but not both.
However, how about watching these beautiful short films while you’re waiting at your doctor’s office or at the emergency room? Several of us suggested approaching that market, somehow. (I was reminded of a former husband of mine, a sports guy with no interest in plants, but who’d often join me as I watched shows on HGTV – real gardening shows back then, not today’s programming – because he found it “so calming.”)
Check it Out Yourself in Miami!
I had an absolutely wonderful 24 hours in the Norfolk-Suffolk area, thanks to PlantPop’s perfectly planned and executed festival, where I felt at home right away among such good and creatively inclined people. So without a hesitation I encourage readers to:
- Submit your film to the 2025 PlantPop Festival here or via Film Freeway.
- Attend! It’s scheduled for November 15 in Miami, Fl. I think regular tickets were just $25.