When I enter the sweet warmth of the Bangor Garden Show, everything feels right with the world. My bones loosen up. My coat flies off. I fly into the garden.

And there it is: the midsummer night’s eve of green trees and moist black earth, flowering shrubs, massed perennials, small waterfalls, tool sheds (potting sheds, pergolas, gazebos, fairy and fantasy sheds), and winding paths that lead to many discoveries.

This year I got an early start on the Garden Show, which kicks off tonight and runs through Sunday at the Bangor Auditorium, and is being staged by Keep Bangor Beautiful, the nonprofit group devoted to anti-littering, recycling and beautification. The show is sponsored by the City of Bangor, the Robert and Catherine Barrett Fund for Landscape Horticulture at the University of Maine, WBRC Architects Inc. and Serca Foodservice.

I found out firsthand about many of the exhibits and toured the greenhouses of two people whose creations will be on display. Both environments were bursting with hundreds of young seedlings that stretched and budded with the vigor of the young.

As I drove to Rocky Ridge Perennials in East Orland, it was 18 degrees. Boomlets of wind rocked the car and gusts of snow swept the road. At journey’s end, I found John O’Keefe whose two greenhouses transformed the wind-chill factor into a morning in June. I fell to touching large and small leaves, variegated and mossy ones. I plunged my hand into a wheelbarrow filled with pebbly, fragrant soil. I sniffed at potted seedlings that O’Keefe picked up, explaining conditions that make this or that plant happy, or demonstrating with a deft movement how a certain plant could serve as a companion to another in his hand.

Plants that may highlight O’Keefe’s display this year include campanulas, Dickson’s gold, geraniums, delphinium, salvia, columbine, Jacob’s ladder, larkspur, lavender, adjuatum, flax, coral bells, lamb’s ear, fringed bleeding hearts, and silvermound.

At Mary Lou Hoskins’ Greencare, just inside the Hermon border on Route 2, I found a tropical jungle of greenery, some of it so tall that it brushed the top of my head as I walked under it. Water trickled into floating gardens in inauspicious locations, ferns and fronds jumbled together. I came across a comfortable old wooden garden chair, potted geraniums, and shiny blue globes that barely peeked out from leafy grottos.

A cockatiel named Tilly lives in a festive cage whose door is always open, and a parakeet named Oscar resides next door. Tilly likes to dance on her doorstep and survey the world, and when you stop to admire her pretty feathers, she takes your measure.

Two beautiful, soulful-looking Angora rabbits occupy cages but have the run of the place after dark. Isabel recently gave birth to three hip-hopping bunnies, each bestowed with a different personality. There’s the large, busy-bee bunny, the medium bunny, and the small bunny that likes to cuddle. Their fur is as soft and white as their inner ears are velvety pink.

An interior landscaper, Hoskins leases plants to businesses, visiting to administer TLC to bamboos, palms, ferns and water lilies. Occasional ailing specimens return to the greenhouse to recuperate amid the sounds of trickling water and midnight bunny feet.

At the show, Greencare’s display will include bright-flowering plants that attract hummingbirds and butterflies – crab apples, yarrow, morning glories, scarlet runner beans, orchids, nasturtiums. Various items from the shop will be woven into the design bound to soothe the soul.

Soothing is the sole purpose of The Healing Garden that is new to the Garden Show this year. As many people know, gardens have been healing places since the beginning of time. Working the soil with hands heals, as does the joy of realizing the fruits of one’s labor.

The University of Maine School of Social Work, which offers a program in Horticultural Therapy, has teamed up with Care Development of Bangor to create a raised garden suitable for persons in wheelchairs or anyone else who lacks the agility to work on knees and haunches, or standing up. They will also educate people about flowers that communicate specific meaning to the recipient. For example, thyme represents courage; lemon balm, healing and rejuvenation; bee balm, compassion; French marigold, grief; rosemary, remembrance.

Maureen “Mo” McGlinn, whose fairy house was last year’s showstopper, is teaming up with Family Tree Landscaping to create a moonlight, woodland water garden that will feature evergreens, shrubs, and white blooms. Her idea is to depict the beauty of the Maine woods while using materials, including the water, that can be a part of your own back yard.

Entwood Farm & Nursery in Burnham, whose display of bonsai is always mobbed, will create an Oriental meditation space to evoke feelings of peace and serenity. As one of last year’s buyers of a Chinese elm, I can attest to the bonsai’s power to convey a feeling of inner peace. It was a bear to look after, though, and I moved it from window to window as it lost leaves and defied my care. But it was my fault. I didn’t read the directions that came with the plant until it was almost too late. (This is an occupational hazard for gardeners who have been at it for 30 years; you get to thinking you know it all. You don’t.)

Entwood’s printed advice, along with a second-hand book on bonsai that my husband brought to the rescue, turned the tide. The elm not only survived, it thrives, and I cherish its meditative beauty. It has grown and will soon need a larger pot.

Steve and Donna Palmer of Plainview Farms in North Yarmouth will create a woodland garden that shows many plants that happily grow in shade while the Village Nursery will use natural land contours to shape a backyard patio that calls up childhood fantasies. Windswept Gardens will unveil a courtyard that will transport show attendees to exotic locales – Tuscany, Provence, perhaps the French Quarter of New Orleans.

The Bangor show is bolstered by many people whose names are not up in lights but contribute talent and material. Among them is Sprague’s Nursery, which again will sponsor the imaginative displays of schoolchildren, who are natural landscapers. Another is Everlasting Farm, which will provide most of the plants in the UMaine garden.

This year’s “The Kids Grow Too!” exhibits will center not only on gardening, but on composting and recycling. The younger generation has got it right about that, and I find them more aware than many of their elders about the necessity of sustaining the earth.

The Children’s Room will offer a series of presentations revolving around the theme of “Bark, Bears, Bees, & Bugs.” There will be owls, an insect zoo, a talk on how bees live and work, and a display of a beaver home.

Led by keynote speaker Roger Swain of PBS’ “The Victory Garden,” the adult lecture series will feature Windswept Gardens’ Bob Bangs, who will cover container gardening; Lou Cappiello on “The Healing Power of Native American Herbs: Medicine System of the Cherokee;” and other knowledgeable personalities and topics such as heirloom seeds, orchids, apples birdhouses, beekeeping, and – the ideal garden goal – bloom-succession.

Educational displays include the Maine Herb Society, Maine Audubon Society, Peony Society of Maine, Ecotat Gardens and Arboretum, Curran Homestead, Maine Forest Service, and more.

If I hadn’t stopped by the Ecotat Gardens table three years ago, I wouldn’t have known it existed. I had driven past the place on Route 2 in Hermon numerous times but assumed it was a private home whose hedges hid promise of a particularly beautiful garden. Since then, I have walked there several times for pure unmitigated pleasure. Ecotat offers 90 acres of open and woodland areas, a maze, formal and informal gardens, and winding paths. It is maintained by a crew of volunteers.

Vendors will create a veritable garden-lovers’ mecca at this year’s show: cedar lawn furniture and walkways; tree services, the Maine Audubon Nature Store, Johnny’s Selected Seeds; pressed flower jewelry, dried fruit and nuts, dried mushrooms, herb teas, yogurt-covered cranberries; hot tubs, barbecues, gazebos, gardening books, garden magazine subscriptions; sculptures and garden ornaments. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Big spenders may want to spring for Preview Night, whose theme this year is Red, White and Blues in honor of national heroes and cultural heritage, the latter represented by the live jazz and blues that will be played. (Last year, they performed from the bed of an old pickup truck in the middle of a leafy green garden, but this year, … y’all come see).

Preview Night attendees also dine on fine food and scoop wine from fountains, which is a Dionysian activity and positively delightful. Roger Swain will give the keynote speech, and the Ellen Louise Payson Scholarship Award will be announced. The ticket also permits free entry to the show on one of the succeeding three days. Last year, I used my freebie to go back and carry off the Chinese elm whose comely grace I had only glimpsed on Preview Night.