At 10 a.m. on Sunday March 16, when Busch Gardens Europe opens its doors for 2008 season pass preview day, landscapers will be working feverishly to put the last flower in the ground. England will open first. Germany will open at 11 a.m. The staggered opening gives Busch Gardens’ floral artists 60 more precious minutes to add the finishing touch to the park’s revered and unrivaled beauty.

Busch Gardens Europe has been named the world’s most beautiful theme park for 17 consecutive years by the National Amusement Park Historical Association. How does it continue to earn that title?

The day starts around 6 a.m. when the five full-time and 24 seasonal employees set about the park armed with mobile watering trucks, and mini-trucks full of fresh flowers and plants. Through the course of the operating day plants get disturbed. Each morning the staff has to make everything look perfect again. “I like to think that we apply the make-up,” said Jim Nunweiler, floriculture supervisor, who has worked at the park for 13 years. The landscaping staff must work fast, with only a few hours of sunlight each morning before the park opens. After the park opens the staff goes to lunch. After lunch the workers arrange plants for the next morning.

Busch Gardens manages to plant 100,000 flowers and plants yearly in Busch Gardens Europe and Water Country USA. Certified arborists maintain the indigenous trees that the park has carefully been built around. Some are over 100 years old. The park uses 22,000 square feet of greenhouses to grow plants and keep a reserve of the flowers and small plants that inhabit the grounds.

A month before opening Nunweiler is “hardening off” some plants. This involves dropping the greenhouse temperature to get the plants ready for cold March in Williamsburg. They have to make the azaleas bloom before the general park opening on March 21.

“Why do pansies get picked on?” One employee asks another outside the administration building. Snow has covered the pansies as well as the grounds of the park. The pansies' beautiful purple and yellow leaves trumpet through the snow. “Everyone calls them wimps. Well, now look at them.”

There are flowers everywhere at Busch Gardens, even throughout the employee areas. Next to the employee security gate there is a bare spot of land that is reserved for employees to bring their kids in May in order to plant their own garden.

Why does a theme park put so much work into landscape beautification? “Simply because Mr. Busch values the landscaping,” said Eileen Weldon, Landscape Manager for 33 years. Mr. Busch is August Busch III, the great-grandson of Anheuser-Busch founder Adolphus Busch and former Chairman, President and CEO of the park for 30 years. In November 2006 his son August Anheuser Busch IV took over.

“Mr. Busch loves us to drive him around the park and show him all the different things we’ve planted,” said Nunweiler.

As you walk through the greenhouses every plant has a large popsicle-type stick with two things written: the name of the plant and where in the park it goes. One plant is marked “Ivy-Italy Bridge." When you get to the potting station you are at, what Nunweiler calls, “the heart of the operation.” Most of a worker’s day is spent getting dirt underneath their fingernails potting plants.

To walk the park in the off-season can be an empty-feeling. Without the hustle and bustle of people having fun and a beautiful budding spring landscape there is not much to look at. At the park entrance the waterfalls have been drained and there are many fenced off areas with freshly-turned dirt. Some have potted plants waiting to be planted. Inside the park there are empty pots and baskets and bare spots all around where there usually is beauty.

Outside of the Royal Palace Theater in France a bed of flowers is covered in strawberry cloth to protect it from the cold. In front of the train station in France the snow-covered tulips are protected behind fencing. Staples go deep into the ground to keep out rabbits and deer.

Yes, deer.

They wander the grounds of the park and they don’t want to ride the Griffon, although they may have an interest in shopping. Nunweiler said that years ago a buck trotted through a gift shop amidst park-goers in broad daylight. However beautiful they are, deer are even more destructive than rabbits and a nuisance for any gardener.

After the spring season the landscapers will have to remove the spring flowers, like violas and those hearty pansies, and replace them with flowers that can handle the hot humid Virginia summer like petunias, marigolds and begonias. After the summer there is the fall season to plant for, as Howl-O-Scream weekends bring huge crowds through the end of October. Weldon said “everyday is different and we're always in a rush so that has continued to make it interesting.”

This year Busch Gardens Europe is inviting its guests to come into the greenhouses and see the work it does maintaining its award-winning beauty. On the weekends of April 19 and 20, and on April 26 and 27, Busch Gardens will host its first ever “Ready Set Grow” event. Besides hosting a set of rarely-given greenhouse tours, there will also be a slew of landscaping workshops and demonstrations. England will also premiere “The Garden Gate,” an open-air landscape shop selling pots, seeds and gardening accessories. There will be a topiary display. There will be a tulip display with an expert from Holland. There also will be gardening activities for children.

While children are stepping over plants and running to the roller coasters and their parents are grabbing an aspirin or maybe a beer, Jim Nunweiler, Eileen Weldon and the rest of the landscaping staff will be taking inventory of the next day’s work. What needs to be planted or touched up and where? By the time 7 a.m. hits the next day, the mini-trucks will be loaded up with plants and staff will assail the park again for the race against time.

10 a.m. hits again. Do they ever get a break?

“Greenhouse work is never done,” said Nunweiler. “We work for eight hours a day. The plants, however, are growing 24 hours a day.”