Like any good 30th birthday celebration, Floriade is going all out this year.
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Canberra's month-long celebration of spring, which opens this Saturday in Commonwealth Park, celebrates three decades this year with a 'best of' series of flower beds.
From flowers shaped like a range of fruit to a DNA strand, the top garden beds from over the years have been recreated for this year's milestone birthday.
"So we're bringing back the best of the best from the past," said head gardener Andrew Forster .
"And it's a really great circuit this year - [the flowers are] going right down to the lake where we haven't had flowers for a number of years, and there's traders spread out through the site. The designers have come up with themed garden beds from the last 30 years and it looks fabulous."
Mr Forster has seen every one of Floriade's 30 years - he started at the inaugural event in 1988 as an apprentice, and even helped out at the trial at Yarralumla nursery in 1987. This year marks his 20th Floriade in the top job.
He said the highlight is always the people that he meets, from members of the public, through to special visitors like the Queen, who visited in 2011 with Prince Phillip.
"We walked her up through [the park]. She loved it. It was about three minutes of fame walking through and she was pointing out the English daisies," Mr Forster said.
"It was just like a walk with Grandma through the flowers. That was pretty special."
As always, Mr Forster said the best way to appreciate the floral arrangements is to take a ride on the ferris wheel.
This year's Floriade runs September 16 - October 15, with extended opening hours from 10am-7pm daily.
For the first time, Floriade will launch with an evening concert on Friday night, and Nightfest, the event's ticketed after-dark experience, will run for two weekends instead of the usual one, featuring musicians, comedians and pop-up performances.
Organisers are hoping for better weather this year, after Floriade was closed for an unprecedented two days in 2016 due to heavy rainfall.
But Mr Forster said the weather leading up to the event has been everything they could have asked for.
"This year everything's looking great. We've had sunshine from when we finished planting, we've had a little bit of rain and the plants are doing what they've been asked to do," said Mr Forster.
