The Commonwealth Park fairies at the bottom of this year's Floriade of more than one million bulbs and annuals will have something new to gossip about.
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After last year's modest but successful trial of growing just a few of Floriade's flowers off-site in just two portable boxes this year's Floriade will make a revolutionary use of 192 of these big, metal "modules".
For the moment the 192 are massively arranged together at the Yarralumla Nursery. There the infant tulips, pansies, irises, hyacinths and other Floriade staples (very few of them sporting any flowers yet) are protected from birds by swathes of netting. Closer to Floriade's opening (this year's gaudy festival is from 17 September to 16 October) the boxes will be trucked to Commonwealth Park and (with the fairies looking on, grumbling, for fairies hate change) artfully juxtaposed together.
The boxes at Yarralumla are all carefully marked with section numbers and will be appropriately aligned together at the Floriade site, like jigsaw or LEGO pieces.
At Yarralumla on Monday, with netting-thwarted birds twittering noisily all around us, Jasmine De Martin of Events ACT explained that the boxes represent "an innovative way of growing gardens in any space".
These innovations, with Events ACT working in collaboration with StrathAyr Turf Systems the makers of drop-in grass sports venues, reflect trends in gardening. As the quarter-acre block becomes a thing of blessed memory so many of today's gardeners are doing their gardening with containers on petite apartment patios and in small townhouse yards.
De Martin says that at Floriade there will be no attempt to disguise the clustered boxes as orthodox flower beds (this reporter had imagined cosmetic bankings up of soil).
"In fact we want to shine a light on the planter boxes as a new way of doing gardening," she insists.
The other push for a boxed-in Floriade comes from the National Capital Authority's concerns about how much of Commonwealth Park has previously been taken up for much of the year by Floriade beds. Henceforth, for as long as Floriade continues in Commonwealth Park the flower festival's "footprint" there will be made more dainty. There will still be some permanent beds, but now augmented by the arranged boxes trucked across town and plonked in place (the process is estimated to take three days) as Floriade's opening day approaches. The flowers of the plonked-in-place boxes will constitute a 10th of this Floriade's total display.
Ralph Waldo Emerson thought that "The earth laughs in flowers," and 480,500 visitors went to 2015's Floriade to join in the mirth.
