March 1st brings us to the lengthy EPCOT International Flower & Garden Festival. While we enjoy this festival, we wish they could extend the Festival of the Arts, but we are here to show off the awesome topiaries that come with the flower & garden festival, some food, and the rock garden series! Let’s dig in, shall we?
EPCOT International Flower & Garden Festival features the Disney World Orange Bird. For those unfamiliar with the orange bird, he is a mascot of sorts for Walt Disney World. He is a cute little bird created for the Florida Citrus Commission by Disney in trade for sponsorship of the Tiki Room at the Magic Kingdom. While Figment is associated with EPCOT, the Orange Bird is related to this festival more. As you can guess, most of the merchandise has the Orange Bird on it, however don’t count Figment out, as he sneaks onto a couple of items as well.
EPCOT International Flower & Garden Festival Topiaries
There are plenty of displays to enjoy for the Flower & Garden Festival, and throughout the next couple of sections, we will showcase them, starting with our favorite, the topiaries! Topiary is an art form of shaping trees into ornamental shapes, and Disney does this with their lovable characters. Below we will show you all of them in our slideshow, as there are many of them. This year they refreshed some of their older models and made them bigger. Also, they included their newer and very popular Encanto characters in the mix.
EPCOT Garden Festival Food and Merchandise
As with every festival at EPCOT, there are food booths around the world showcase to try. While we didn’t eat at all, we will highlight our favorites below. It would take an incredible metabolism or an army of friends to try everything offered in one day. We won’t keep you in suspense though our favorite item in all booths is the Taco Vampiro at the Mexico food booth. I am not sure why it just hits us just right every time!
Next we hop over to Japan to their food booth to grab a refreshing cold beer that is made with cherry blossoms and also the Cream Shrimp Udon which is amazing! Highly recommend trying the udon whereas the beer I couldn’t really recommend.
The next stop is Florida Fresh, a booth in front of the World Showcase lagoon. Passing by, we wanted to try the Florida Strawberry Shortcake and the Blackened Fish Slider. The fish slider was delicious, however, the Shortcake was awful. Now while I have nothing against Strawberries and whipped cream, the bread of choice was a very dry biscuit and missed the mark.
After the mess that was the Strawberry Shortcake, we felt like we needed a real dessert. That brought us to Canada and the Chocolate Maple Whiskey cake. Also, we grabbed the seared scallops because why not? Both were tasty and highly recommended! The maple whiskey cake looked like a lava cake in disguise, but it offered so much more! The crème in the middle is maple, which just hit right with the chocolate.
Final Thoughts on EPCOT International Flower and Garden Festival
Before you avoid it, remember that the Holiday and Art festivals are amazing times of year for weather and holiday, whereas this festival is the longest and stretches on for a long time. In terms of this festival, it is a lot of fun, but not our favorite. If we ranked the festivals, it would be our least favorite.
What are your thoughts on the EPCOT International Flower and Garden Festival? Let us know in the comments.
