Epcot Flower & Garden Festival 2013 Guide
The 2013 Epcot International Flower & Garden Festival runs from March 6, 2013 until May 19, 2013 at Walt Disney World. For the first time in 2013, this special event will also have food kiosks, like a mini Food & Wine Festival! The event gives Disney guests a glimpse at expert-designed flower and garden displays and Disney character topiaries, and also includes the “Flower Power” live music concert series and special programs and seminars by HGTV (the main sponsor), DIY, and Epcot expert gardeners. Most of the offerings for Epcot’s Flower & Garden Festival are included with theme park admission to Epcot. In this guide, we’ll cover everything you should see during the 2013 Epcot International Flower & Garden Festival!
Whether you’re a first time guest or a seasoned veteran of Walt Disney World, visiting during Epcot’s Flower & Garden Festival is a great idea. Epcot is at its most beautiful during Flower & Garden Festival. The place smells and looks wonderful, and there are a lot of unique offerings, displays, and photographic opportunities.
Just to give you an idea of how impressive Epcot looks at this time of year, here are some stats: 30-million blooms, 240 floating flower planters, 700 gardens, over 75 Disney character topiaries, 30 flower towers, and one beautiful butterfly tapestry of flowers all culminate in an incredibly vibrant time of year for Epcot! It takes more than one year and 400 Walt Disney World horticulturists to prepare for the 75-day Flower and Garden Festival.
Some of you are probably thinking, “yeah, but I loathe gardening and I much prefer barren concrete to vibrant flowers.” Well, if that’s the case, I can’t recommend visiting Epcot during the International Flower and Garden Festival. However, if your views on flowers and gardening aren’t quite that extreme, it’s a great time to visit. I groan when Sarah turns on HGTV (just how many episodes of a show about decorating a house to resell it can one person watch?!) and I’ve been known to (accidentally, I swear!) run over portions of our own garden with the lawnmower, but I love visiting during Flower & Garden Festival. The park is gorgeous, smells great, and there are a lot of unique things to photograph. Much like the Behind the Seeds tour, while the fundamental substance of the presentations at Flower & Garden Festival doesn’t appeal to me, the overall “feel” and ambiance of the Festival does appeal to me. It’s a really fun time to be at Epcot!
2013 Epcot Flower & Garden Festival Stuff to Do!
If you’re going to be in Walt Disney World during the 2013 Epcot International Flower & Garden Festival, here’s the full listing of special “stuff” for the event, and whether we think it’s worth your time to experience. It’s also worth noting that those visiting during the last weekend of the Flower & Garden Festival can also hit the first weekend of the 2013 Star Wars Weekends. Plan accordingly to make sure you are able to experience both!
Garden Marketplaces – New for 2013 is the “Garden Marketplaces,” which are essentially Food & Wine Festival kiosks offering food and drinks. Marketplaces that have been announced thus far are “Florida Fresh,” “Smokehouse BBQ & Brew,” “Primavera Kitchen,” “Hanami,” “Fruits by the Glass,” and “Pineapple Promenade.” There will be 8 kiosks in addition to these, making these significantly smaller than Food & Wine Festival, but still fairly substantial.
There’s little doubt to us that these kiosks are being added because Food & Wine Festival is extremely lucrative for Disney. With the huge lines for $4-8 samples, how could it not be lucrative?! Regardless of motives, we are extremely excited for this addition. We absolutely love Food & Wine Festival, and we’re excited to blow big chunks of money at these kiosks, too. If you’ve never attended Epcot’s Food & Wine Festival, it’s worth noting that grazing from these kiosks will cost you considerably more than eating an actual meal. So if you’re looking to save money, stay away from these kiosks. If you’re looking to have a great time and are willing to spend a bit of money (we easily spend $40-60 in an afternoon at Food & Wine Festival kiosks), you should be able to spend an afternoon just wandering these kiosks!
Expert Presentations – HGTV and DIY experts will be on hand offering presentations on a variety of gardening and home improvement-related topics. These TV-celebrities appear every weekend at the Festival Center and offer tips guests can actually use at home (so just because you don’t own a mansion with a team of dedicated horticulturists doesn’t mean it won’t apply to you!).
These presentations are actually pretty interesting, at least for someone like me who has only a rudimentary understanding of gardening. I wouldn’t want to spend all day at these seminars (that would get old quick), and I feel that maybe someone who is really interested in gardening would find the information here a bit “below” them, but for a novice, they’re something worth seeing. Our recommendation is to pick one that stands out and consider others if you really enjoy that one.
Special Gardens & Exhibits – New for 2013 in the World Showcase is the “Land of Oz Garden” display. It sounds like this is 50% garden, 50% play area, 100% promotional tool for Oz: The Great and the Powerful. This garden is set to have Midway games, circus-themed game tents, and a garden with odd plants that “capture the spirit” of the movie. There will also be a crashed hot air balloon from Oz.
These play area/gardens rarely seem all that impressive to us, but this one promises to have a lot more than the average garden/play area. It seems like Disney is going all out (across the board) to promote Oz, so maybe this area received a healthy budget for promoting the film. In any case, it actually sounds pretty cool!
Tinkerbell’s Butterfly House - Bambi’s Butterfly House becomes Tinkerbell’s Butterfly House this year, as fairy topiaries that were previously over by the walkway behind MouseGear are added to the Butterfly house where there are hundreds of butterflies and some pretty flowers.
The switch from Bambi to Tinkerbell is meaningless here, as the big draw is the butterflies. This butterfly house is always really cool, as butterflies fly all over the place and even land on guests. Besides the slight theme-change, it should be pretty similar to the 2012 Butterfly House. We spent about 15-20 minutes in here, and enjoyed our time!
Character Topiaries – Throughout World Showcase and Future World, you’ll over 100 topiaries, with over 75 inspired by Disney films! The highlight at Epcot’s entrance for 2013 will be a Fab-Five topiary with a bobbling Goofy holding an anniversary cake with Donald and Daisy playing badminton, Mickey grilling while Pluto tries to steal sausage, and Minnie lying around.
There will also be monsters all over the place to promote Monsters University, and light-up topiaries for the first-time ever. Other topiaries around Epcot will include Pixar characters, Winnie the Pooh, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Princesses, Lion King characters, and other classic favorites.
For us, the topiaries should be the highlight of Epcot’s Flower & Garden Festival, but they quite often disappoint. The topiaries are recycled from year to year and season to season (you can see some of the exact same topiaries in different locations at Christmas…we have photos of them from Christmas 2007 and they look the same) and are often shoe-horned in places they really don’t belong. The centerpiece this year sounds like it will have a new Goofy topiary, but based on the positions of the other characters, it sounds like the rest will be recycled. It would be nice to have new topiaries each year, especially since in the late 1980s and early 1990s, new topiaries regularly appeared when there wasn’t even a special event (as reflected in one of our favorite Walt Disney World books, Gardens of the Walt Disney World Resort). Still, there are some new topiaries each year, and it’s great to see them added to enhance the park.
We just wish there were a Figment topiary. Maybe a Figment AND Dreamfinder topiary. All else would be forgiven if a special topiary were added over by Journey into Imagination. There used to be a Figment topiary over there, so why not a new one?!
Flower Power Concert Series – This weekend concert series features live music from the 1960s and 1970s during the Flower Power Concert Series. Famous artists rock Epcot’s America Gardens Theatre in World Showcase (near the American Adventure) every Friday, Saturday and Sunday during the Epcot International Flower & Garden Festival at 5:15 p.m., 6:30 p.m. and 7:45 p.m. Bands include Chubby Checker and The Wildcats, Paul Revere & The Raiders, The Orchestra featuring former members of ELO and ELO Part II, the Village People, and Tommy Roe, among many other favorites!
We’ve never actually taken the time to watch a Flower Power Concert, but it’s great to see Disney bringing in some one-time big names, and many of the bands are some reasonably big names. For our short, weekend trips lining up for these shows and watching an entire concert is too big of a time commitment for bands that really don’t command high concert prices on their own, but locals and others really seem to love these shows. Now, if Elton John and Billy Joel were to appear together in a show as part of the concert series, we’d be the first ones in line at park opening to see them!
Other Stuff - Other not-to-be-missed special exhibits include: the Radiator Springs play zone, which will feature topiaries from Cars and a small play area; The Festival Center (in the former Wonders of Life pavilion), featuring merchandise and presentations by Disney horticulture experts from Disney’s Animal Kingdom and other parks and HGTV Design experts; and, illuminated gardens and topiaries that will twinkle and glow each night.
Overall, there’s a decent amount to do at the Flower & Garden Festival, and something that will appeal to everyone. We recommend visiting during the Epcot International Flower & Garden Festival, but it’s not something around which you should plan a trip. It’s our second favorite time to visit Epcot, after the International Food & Wine Festival.
One of the cooler aspects of the Flower & Garden Festival, in my opinion, is that you can visit multiple times and have a totally different experience each time. This is not only because the presenters and bands change, but because halfway through the festival, Disney gardeners remove the blossoms that thrive in early-spring to plant a new crop of flowers that flourish in late-spring’s warmer temperatures. This is great for those guests visiting during the concluding weeks of the Festival, as they don’t have to worry about seeing a bunch of wilted flowers. It’s beautiful during the Festival’s entire run!
Although there are new offerings each year, generally not a ton differs from year to year. The same character topiaries are used year in and year out (with a few exceptions), and most of the new content consists of thinly veiled promotional pieces for upcoming Disney films. There are some exceptions to this in 2013, as it appears some neat additions (like the light-up topiaries) will enhance without being in-your-face, but other things like the Oz Garden are clearly there for the sake of promotion. We’re looking forward to the Garden Marketplaces, but it’s obvious these are attempting to capitalize on the colossal success of the Food & Wine Festival, which rakes in a ton of money for Walt Disney World. Obviously Disney is a business, and in this case we love the booths at Food & Wine Festival, so we think these are a smart addition to the 2013 Flower & Garden Festival that will benefit both guests and Disney. It would be nice to see similar investments in overhauling the topiaries that haven’t changed in the last 5 years or so, but we can’t complain too much because clearly a lot of effort is being put into this festival that is included with theme park admission to Epcot. Based on what Disney has announced thus far, it appears 2013 will bring the biggest set of additions to the Flower & Garden Festival in a long time, which is great to see. It’s a beautiful time of year to visit Epcot, and we’re really looking forward to the Festival!
For more details on Flower & Garden Festival, including kiosk menus, check out this newly released 2013 Epcot Flower & Garden Festival Map.
Your Thoughts…
Have you ever been to Epcot International Flower & Garden Festival? Considering attending? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!
16 Responses to “Epcot Flower & Garden Festival 2013 Guide”
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- Disney World February 2012 Trip Report Part 5 - Disney Tourist Blog - [...] and then onto Journey into Imagination with Figment. The park was already being beautified for Flower and Garden Festival, ...
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We went last year at the end of February. While it was not officially F&G season, many of the flowers and topiaries were already up! It was beautiful!
We have been lucky to visit the past 2 years and it is fantastic, will be there for 1 day only in April and looking forward to it.
I have to go on a visit to see the MIL in Georgia this May, so I was going to try to tack on a few days at the end for the F&GF. I was really hoping that there would be a concert that would really entice my husband into agreeing to this plan, but I just don’t think that Herman’s Hermits is gonna cut it. I’m still gonna try!
I’m really trying but I’m just not getting into all the Oz stuff.
Are you telling me your husband doesn’t love the world famous Herman’s Hermits?!?!?!
I feel the same way about Oz. Disney is pushing it HARD. I wonder if it will be any good. No advance reviews as of yet suggests not…
Leaving on Saturday and will be there opening day!
Awesome, have a great time! Be on the lookout for Mater Topiary. He’s not in Japan this year!!!
I went to the F&GF last year and got engaged in front of the Winnie the Pooh topiary! It’s such a wonderful transformation of Epcot and totally worth checking out at least once!!
There is so much effort into making the characters. The park really *POPS* with color and engergy.
I’m sure it holds a special place in your heart now, congrats! Epcot definitely pops with color and energy during Flower & Garden Festival, and as a photographer, it’s my favorite time of year in the park. Unlike me, most people probably wouldn’t visit simply because “flower planters are more photogenic than usual,” though!
I’ve been in 2009 and 2011 and liked it, but wasn’t blown away because to me it didn’t seem like much extra besides the topiaries, which are beautiful. So I can’t wait this year for the food and drink kiosks! Me and my husband are heading down for Food and Wine this year in October but have never been before, so when we’re there this April it will hopefully be like a mini Food and Wine Festival to prepare us for the real thing!
Interesting – A friend of mine did a marathon down there and had a good time. I wish I’d known about them back when I could run.
I’m more curious about the noob transportation mistake. Can it top our trip from AKL to AK when we got on the Downtown Disney bus and went ALK -> DD – AoA -> AK?
I’m not sure how this comment got on the F&G post instead of the RunDisney post. Sorry!
As for the F&G, we’ve been lucky enough to visit during Food and Wine, Flower and Garden, and Christmas, and I think Flower and Garden might be my favorite time to visit Disney World. (Partly because it’s been 3 straight months of gray in the midwest and the color and slowers are an awesome change of pace)
Haha, I wondered about that!
Same idea as your mistake. Involves getting on the wrong monorail.
Can’t wait to see all 30 million blooms! We’re heading down in April! YAY!!!
I think the addition of the food kiosks is genius. I don’t see it as a sceme for Disney to make money, although I’m sure they will. Instead, I think it’s really just giving the people what they want. Everyone I know raves about the Food & Wine Festival and we all devoutly attend each year. Outside of the F&W Festival, we don’t visit Epcot very often. The addition of the food kiosks at the Flower & Garden Festival has changed that. We are all so excited to have an entirely different menu offered with a spring garden theme. It’s a great time of year to be outside in Florida and I bet the flowers at the festival will be beautiful, all of which I will be seeing purely because of the addition of the food this year. F&W and F&G will both be marked on my calendar from now on.
Tom, both of my girl share your desire for a Figment topiary as well!