By Jay Sorgi • Posted September 24, 2026

A magnolia can express the glory of God. So can a bright, yellow daisy, an orchid or countless other flora and fauna.

St. Helena Church in Blue Bell, Montgomery County and the Norristown Garden Club collaborated Saturday, Sept. 12 to host a free flower show inside the parish’s gymnasium.

Parish leaders aim to use the event to help create moments of encounter giving people a stronger sense of the beauty of God’s creation and the need to foster and protect it.

Director of Parish Services Lindy Johnson said that she pushed for the church to host the event when the Norristown Garden Club approached them as a host of the 113-year-old club’s latest flower show.

“We’ve been looking for outreach and ways to get into the community. They’re offering it as education, free to the public, and it draws in people that we normally wouldn’t have here at our church,” said Johnson.

She is also a member of EcoPhilly, a local organization focuses on the need for greater care for creation.

“We thought this was a fantastic opportunity,” Johnson said, “because we would start to pull people in and start to see the interest that has to do with gardening and taking care of God’s creation.”

Her husband Phil said that St. Helena Parish has wanted to welcome community groups to use their gymnasium and other facilities for events, all to help bring in people from outside the parish including families who can aid the Church’s evangelizing mission.

“With the Catholic Church, one of the things that we have is stewardship of the Earth,” he said. “This helps to promote the preservation of skills related to gardening (and) growing food. The general awareness of the environment is enhanced and increased.”

The show, entitled “Happy Birthday USA: An NGC Standard Flower Show,” came during the first part of the Catholic Church’s month-long “Season of Creation.”

It also coincides with the Jubilee Year of St. Francis, a celebration of the 800th anniversary of the death of a saint whose life was partially devoted to greater care for God’s creation.

Phil Johnson described how the event creates a tangible way for people to foster their love of nature, to see how even the wind can carry seed to help life grow, and for people to be seed-planters in their own life.

“This gives (participants) a chance to see how you plant, what can happen when you have raised them from seeds all the way up to something as beautiful as what they’re looking at on their own display on the table,” he said. “Maybe, a few of them will decide it’s something they like to do.”

Many of the show’s ribbon winners shared flower presentations that offered patriotic meaning. One example includes a daisy display that was meant to symbolize the first sunrise after 9/11, the terrorist attacks of 2001.

Arlene Reagan-Harris, the flower show’s co-chair, said that NGC has aimed to work more with local churches to collaborate on events and help promote conservation, the beauty of nature and the realization of what creation gives, something she said she has noticed since she was younger.

“As a child, I used to lay on the ground and watch ants carry one grain of sand to their anthill and build. They’d come out, go back (with) another grain of sand. That’s community, and that is what is created here on our Earth,” she said.

“I always loved seeds, planted gardens, collected nature when I needed a bouquet and didn’t want to spend the money on fresh flowers. I’d go to the field and pick the wildflowers.”

St. Helena’s has its share of flowers that grow on the property, but Lindy Johnson said parishioners have often shared an interest in making the campus even more beautiful, to entice them to visit and create opportunities for further evangelization.

“We have people that just drive in and say, ‘How do we join here? It is a beautiful place,’ and then it brings them in. It was more to give people an opportunity to see this whole thing, see what we’re about and draw people in,” she said.

“Audiences that wouldn’t normally come to the Catholic Church to visit are coming in. I thought this was a unique way to get them here.”

Johnson hopes that events like these at St. Helena would additionally support the EcoPhilly movement through the parish.

“We have beautiful property here. We’ve been blessed with so much,” she said. “It’s a way for people to just really stop, pause and appreciate what God has created.”

The garden event confirmed for Johnson and her husband the need to put environmental concerns into action to protect creation.

“Here and all within God’s creation, all that He’s given us, the bounty that He’s provided,” Phil Johnson said, “it’s there for us to cultivate and to appreciate.”