Behind the Scenes at Cultivate: Preparing for the Largest Horticulture Industry Tradeshow
Daphne Ball Marketing Intern
Cultivate is a crazy and exciting time; it’s one of the biggest tradeshows in the green industry! So as an intern, this is one of the prominent highlights of the summer. Every summer, all 10 Ball Horticultural interns step into an environment unlike anything we’ve experienced before.
Cultivate is filled with opportunities to learn, network, and discover new areas of horticulture. A conversation with a grower, breeder, or industry professional can completely change your perspective — or even influence your future career.
Here’s what the first two days of Cultivate'26 looked like from an intern’s perspective. There wasn’t much time to stand around. As soon as we retrieved our badges, Emily Greene, our Cultivate tradeshow manager, had us unloading three trucks packed with more than 30 pallets of beautiful flowers. Seeing the sheer volume of plants made it clear just how much work happens before attendees ever step onto the show floor.
Once the plants reached their designated booths, the real setup began. We assembled displays, arranged catalogs, moved furniture into place, prepared coffee stations, and tackled countless behind-the-scenes details that visitors rarely notice but make the booth feel polished and welcoming.
I was assigned to the PanAmerican Seed booth alongside fellow intern Josh. Our goal was simple: Make sure everything was ready before the show opened. We organized catalogs, iced soil in the plant pots to keep them looking their best – something I had never heard of before – and carefully arranged the displays. It was satisfying to watch the booth transform from an empty space into something that truly represented the quality of the PanAmerican Seed brand.
By the time we left the convention center on Saturday evening, we were tired, our feet sore, and we’d moved what felt like hundreds of boxes and carts. But seeing the finished booths made every trip across the convention center worth it. It was hard to believe that in less than 24 hours, the booths we’d spent days preparing would be filled with thousands of industry experts from around the world, and the importance of that pushed us interns through turning a warehouse space into picture perfect, catalog-worthy, displays.
