Title: Dollywood’s Behind the Blooms Guided Tour

Author: Joshua Hodge

Published: April 23, 2023

Category: Festivals

What’s Unique about Flower and Food Festival?

On Dollywood.com it’s stated, “Dollywood's Flower & Food Festival celebrates the beautiful blossoms and fresh flavors of the season…” For quick reference, let me list some of the special things about the Flower and Food Festival:

• Beautiful mosaicultures 

• Umbrella Sky (520 colorful umbrellas hanging over Showstreet)

• Unique festival food offerings

• Bloom! - Dollywood’s unique ariel show

• Special musical acts

• Free Experience Guide (a festival passport)

• Tons of flowers (over 1 millions blooms)

• And more!

The Tour

All of the unique festival features listed above are available to experience with admission to the park, but the guided tour is an add-on and walks one through these experiences in a curated manner with a lot of additional perks. Let me bring you along my tour as I recount it here: 

I checked in for the tour at the TimeSaver & Special Experiences Reservation Center at the front of the park. There I received three items: a colorful tour lanyard, a voucher to exchange for a gift in the Emporium, and a one-time use TimeSaver pass.

We began our tour beside the Showstreet Palace Theatre with a friendly welcome from our tour guide and personal photographer. There were eleven of us on the tour. Throughout the tour, not only would the tour guides share interesting facts and features of the park and festival, but the personal photographer was a great addition, snapping great photos of us as a group and also taking individual portraits at all the greatest photo ops of the festival.

Our first tour stop was at Sweet Shoppe Candy Kitchen to sample some of the festival specific fudge. On the docket for the bright colorful themed festival were, “Berry Delicious,” “Chocolate Cherry,” and “Pink Sprinkle Donut.” This would be one of a few stops for food samples along the way. By Market Square we got to sample the festival specific Mango Boba Iced Tea and the delicious Kettle Korn, which is always a Dollywood staple for me (read my piece about the Kettle Korn here). Later on in the tour we sampled three varieties of honey from Dollywood's festival resident beekeeper, Alan Frakenberg, with Hug-A-Bee Honey.

In addition to the food sampling stops, we also popped into a few stores within Dollywood including Mountain Laurel Home which includes the giant mill wheel. The guide shared facts about each establishment. I learned that in some of the stores in Dollywood, the entire inventory is of products unique to Dollywood and not able to be purchased anywhere else. We also stopped by some of the locations in the park specific to Dolly Parton’s story including the replica of her Tennessee Mountain Home and the Robert F. Thomas Chapel, which allowed for the guide to share bits and pieces of Dolly’s story.

Of course the prominent feature of the tours are visiting and learning about each mosaiculture in the park. There are 8 different mosaiculture locations in the park. Mosaicultures are often confused with topiaries. The guide shared how topiaries are purely the plants being grown and pruned into shape, while mosaicultures include various plants joined on a steel structure to form a design. The guides shared how it took 1,200 labor hours to install the mosaicultures and flowers for the festival, while the Dollywood landscaping team is only fourteen strong, and the events team consists of seventeen people. That's a lot of work! It was in these stops along the tour the guides shared the most interesting facts. I learned the mosaicultures had been cultivated and brought in from Montreal, Canada. I also learned that the Coat of Many Colors  mosaiculture consists of sixteen types of flowers and weighs 1500 lbs, and some of the flower beds in the park were installed temporarily on top sections of the walkways. There were tons of facts like these shared during the tour, many had to do with impressive numbers.

The tour lasted about two hours and finished at the Hall Sisters performance at the Robert F. Thomas Chapel. It was early in the day and so we had a big portion of the day left to explore and experience the park on our own with a new appreciation for the festival’s decor. I made sure to stop by the Emporium at the end of the day to redeem my voucher for a gift. It was a tabletop wheelbarrow planter with Dollywood's logo and festival name on the side. 

Things I liked Most About the Tour: 

1)The tour allowed me as a guest to slow down a bit in the park. I was able to experience and see a lot on the tour, but I didn’t have to worry about being responsible for fitting it all in. 

2) All the details and timing was taken care of, and that I enjoyed. 

3) I loved the food samples. 

4) It was nice having a personal photographer.

5) This tour really helped me take the time to learn about and appreciate each mosaiculture.

 If you are able to take this or another festival tour at Dollywood, I’d recommend it.