When you pass through a gate or an arch into a garden,” said Bianca St.Louis, “you walk into a different space. There is a shift in your mind and spirit.”

As the owner, with her husband, Ernie Glabau, of Entwood Farm and Nursery in Burnham, St. Louis was talking about the Japanese arch that will lead into their bonsai garden at the Bangor Garden Show, which opens Friday and runs through Sunday at the Bangor Auditorium and Civic Center. Preview night is 6 to 9 today.

St. Louis could have been describing the state of mind that descends on everybody who walks through the doors into the show’s balmy pleasures.

“It’s the first touch of spring, the smell of the grass,” said garden show co-chairman Cindy Stockford, “and even if the sun isn’t shining outside, it is at the show.”

It sure is. Rhododendrons have dressed themselves in lush blossoms of pink, rose, fuchsia and cream to quicken the sluggish winter heart. As do leafy green trees that branch overhead, and ferns that rustle underfoot. Add the visual and olfactory effects of garden walkways, trickling water, patios, fencing and flowers – flowers everywhere – and you feel the sweet brush of a summer’s day.

Maureen “Mo” McGlinn of Wee Gardens in Brewer has created a major-sized head and shoulders of a living green fairy, Mrs. Buttoncaps. Although modeled after a similar woodland creature at a National Trust garden in England, the fairy’s personal attributes grew out of McGlinn’s imagination. The fairy is coifed in wild grasses that twine about a community of little crooked houses, tiny handmade furniture, live baby bunnies and, said the landscaper, “jewels and mystery. Fairies love shiny stuff.”

Mrs. Buttoncaps has a skin of fragrant creeping thyme. She wears sparkling earrings and a headband of pansies set off by miniature Bambino roses that, McGlinn said, glow in the dark, and a small blue flower from California.

The Village Nursery display includes perennials and the many annuals carried at their Levant location, known to passers-by for the gazebo that brims with fresh-picked produce in summer. Owner Gabriel Carr, who at 25 has worked in the nursery business for 11 years, offers the following common and not-so-common flowers in his exhibit: impatiens, bacopa, osteospermum (African daisy), million bells, bracteantha (strawflower), morning glories, verbena, fuchsia, vinca vine, lantana, heliotrope, some new varieties of petunia, and diascia (DAA-she-a).

The latter is new to the nursery this year. “We’re growing two colors,” Carr said, “Strawberry Sundae and Coral Belle. They’re pink, very delicate and semitrailing, which makes them good for containers and walls. They’re elegant. They bloom all summer.”

Not surprisingly, Tapley Pools of Hermon is the most flowing spot at the show, with fountains and other watery delights containing plants such as pond lilies, cattails and iris. The company’s signature item – a Forest Hart bronze sculpture – is back for the 11th year, featuring a 9-foot moose, a doe with twin fawns and Sir and Lady Fox (the sculptor likes to name his creations). Misters give the scene the look of an early June morning. (As a bonus in Maine back yards, if not at the show, misters installed around a terrace will keep mosquitoes and no-see-ums away.)

Rocky Ridge Perennials features a Japanese garden with 13 cubic yards of rocks and 100 types of annuals and perennials. For good measure, the cab of a 1942 Chevy pickup spills over with lobelia. In Orland, where the nursery is located, proprietor John O’Keefe stocks 780 varieties of plants, including 20 varieties of hardy roses (though he credits Bob Bangs of Windswept Gardens with being the rose expert). An extensive catalog is available at the nursery.

Windswept Gardens of Bangor has a Backyard Dreams and Fantasies exhibit, which includes a four-sided, pale-yellow treehouse with arched Gothic windows, a 12-foot deck and a rooster weather vane. A stream runs past, and the dreaminess is intensified by masses of roses, lilacs, hosta, astilbe, birch trees and Japanese maple trees.

Mike Falvey and Jake Mathieu of Family Tree Landscaping in Bangor donned snowshoes to bring back the pine trees in their green-oriented display. You may wander along a brick walk and a stone wall among blue rug juniper, hollies and tulips against a woodsy background of fragrant mugo pines and, providing good samples were found, equally fragrant red and white pines.

Like other exhibitors who display large shrubs and trees at the show, Falvey and Mathieu employed creative thinking in the face of this year’s stubborn winter. As Bob Bangs of Windswept Gardens said, “We moved things into the greenhouse in January, but it was a hard winter for faking them into bloom.”

Mary Lou Hoskins’ Greencare Garden Center in Hermon presents tropical plants and the other potted plants that are its hallmark. “We maintain the plants at Eastern Maine Medical Center, the Olive Garden, the Bangor Mall,” said Hoskins, who called her work “interior landscaping.” Does Greencare do exterior landscaping? “Not if we can help it,” she said with good humor. The exhibit includes seedlings, hanging pots, plants for water gardens, orchids and other greens that people like to grow in pots and ponds.

The exhibit of the University of Maine Horticulture Club, which numbers 15 students and two faculty advisers, features a country cottage-style display with a Katahdin gazebo, wooden benches, brick walkways and a patio with masses of container plantings designed to provide color all spring and summer. A secluded garden includes lemon-scented geraniums, lavender, lilacs and other shrubs and flowers, evergreen and deciduous trees known for their fragrance. Students will be available to answer questions.

For that matter, everybody who has an exhibit will answer gardening questions: texture, sequence of color, soil, mulch, hardiness, maintenance and other mysteries of gardening that you have wanted to know, but have been afraid to ask.

No fewer than 75 vendors will offer jams, dried cranberries and cranberry cookbooks, herbal teas, salsa, lawn and garden furniture, sunrooms, greenhouses, garden equipment, dried flowers, tools, watering cans and mulch. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

You may enhance your awareness of nature’s role in our lives by browsing at the Maine Organic Farming and Gardening Association booth, which offers handouts and first-person information, or linger over photographs and literature at the Ecotat Gardens and Arboretum exhibit. Located on 87 acres with 10 acres of trails in Hermon, the gardens were developed during 50 years of private ownership but opened to the public only six years ago. The Audubon Society and other nonprofit organizations also have small but lively displays to pique your curiosity and that of children.

Children: Under the auspices of the show’s sponsor, Bangor Beautiful, kids worked hard in hundreds of classrooms throughout the Bangor region this year. Each class has brought its creative project to the Kids Grow Too competition, which is underwritten by Sprague’s Nursery and Garden Center of Bangor.

The Fables and Folklore theme in the Children’s Room will captivate the younger set with a yellow brick road that leads over the rainbow into a land of munchkins and fairy-tale characters. The Hudson Museum of the University of Maine has set up a tepee where kids can pot plants and have fun with recyclable trash. A friendly bear will be on hand to tell them about honeybees, owls and butterflies, and they can also play games and do beadwork.

Bangor Beautiful helpers will sell T-shirts and mugs imprinted with the blue hollyhocks from the Lyn Snow painting on this year’s program cover. The flowers are so exquisitely deep blue that if you are a crazy-for-blue-flowers club member, you may want to scream. You may also buy prints of the painting.

As for the scene beyond the Japanese arch at Entwood, it is a panorama of what may qualify as one of the world’s most alluring plants of all time – bonsai trees. These are the miniature apple, pear, elm and maple trees, also forsythia, rosemary, juniper, azalea and other shrubs that the gardener willfully dwarfs into fantastic shapes and grows in graceful porcelain containers (clay pots don’t cut the mustard).

When trees and shrubs in the seedling stage are first potted, their roots trimmed and branches shaped with special bonsai tools, they are called pre-bonsai. As the gardener continues to follow his bliss by pruning roots and branches, the plant grows into a miniature tree, or full-fledged bonsai.

“The fun of bonsai is in creating the shape that you want, in doing it yourself,” said St. Louis. “It is a personal-eye type of thing. It lets people play.”

St. Louis and Glabau answer a lot of questions from serious buyers. The couple also take time to ensure that each plant is fit for its new environment. Is the house it is destined for hot? Drafty? Not much light? A lot of light? Is the prospective owner forgetful? A meticulous caregiver? Some varieties, sedum for example, thrive on neglect. Others need TLC. A care sheet comes with each plant, and Entwood’s customers report a good success rate in keeping their plants healthy, happy and beautiful.

As for Mrs. Buttoncaps, she was sold several weeks ago to a Bangor resident whose garden McGlinn maintains. “She fell in love with her,” said the landscaper, “and she had to have her in the garden.”

Where this garden may be found, only the fairies know.