Landscape Congress took place on January 11, 12 and 13 at the Congress Centre in Toronto. Close to 13,000 landscape professionals in the horticulture, lawn and garden and landscape industries rely on Landscape Ontario's annual trade show to source products and services. Industry personnel include landscape contractors, lawn care professionals, owners of retail garden centres, municipal parks and recreation managers, and grounds maintenance managers. Growers, equipment dealers, arborists, fence contractors, swimming pool contractors, irrigation technicians and others allied to the trade also participate in this informative horticultural event.

Fanshawe has always had a major presence at this event, but it was not only during the show that the Fanshawe horticulture technician program had a role, it was days before the show opened. In the planning stages, the second-year students, along with six program staff, built a 1,000 square foot garden in the building on the Saturday and Sunday before Congress. The garden, called Jurassic Park, was a partnership with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Burlington and several landscape supply companies that saw a garden designed around the theme of prehistoric plants. The garden included a transport truckload of wall and paving material, a large collection of prehistoric plants, including many dead trees and even dinosaurs bones. In one corner of the garden, a video explained the garden and educated the visitors. The garden took the team of 28 students and six faculty over 20 hours to build, but was dismantled on the Thursday at the end of the show in only four hours.

In addition to the garden, the horticulture technician program had a large educational display featuring our new landscape trailer. This was staffed by Mario Scopazzi (co-op) and Michael Pascoe, professor and academic program coodinator with the horticulture technician and apprenticeship horticulture programs, during the three days of the show and appeared to be the most popular college booth at Congress where industry could talk about hiring a Fanshawe student or grad, or where potential students could visit and discuss their career choice.