Lost in Oasis
Horticultural Media Association of Victoria essay competition, Shortlisted, 2009
Why would I, a sensible, mature writer enrol in Floristry at TAFE College (Technical and Further Education)? To cop painful, blistered fingers from wiring flowers? To practice tying impressive florists’ bows, over and over? To make exquisite floral arrangements and clean slimy buckets (often in succession)?
I guess it was something to do with the beauty and transience of flowers, those precious, living jewels. I wanted to be around them and people who love them. Frankly, I also wanted to get a job away from my computer screen.
Each time I entered a florist’s, I was struck by the mysterious nature of their craft. Florists seemed to make arrangements and elaborate wrappings with a magician’s sleight of hand. I would watch them intently and still never comprehend how they managed to make a bouquet or box of flowers look so special.
When it came to the course, I thought it would be a matter of learning a few tricks; that floristry would be a doddle. How hard could it be, talking to people all day and wrapping bunches of beautiful blooms? At the Melbourne International Flower & Garden Show (MIFGS) in March this year, I learned otherwise. I was introduced to the brilliance and excess of exhibition floristry and learned how dirty, tiring and repetitive the world of flowers could be.
As it happened, for several weeks beforehand, my class hadn’t arranged any flowers. Instead, we created white, plaster-covered papier-mache balloons. These were to be scattered in a stylised forest, complete with birch branches, grasses and turf.
The exhibit’s quirky nature was matched by our problems coating giant balloons in sticky, glue-dipped newspaper, followed by coats of plaster of Paris that repeatedly flaked off.
They were, um, “eggs”. Perhaps dinosaur or aliens’. Possibly a mutant Easter Bunny’s. Even our teacher wasn’t sure what they were. But once finished, they were transported to the venue together with vast amounts of stuff: tools, florist’s foam, glue guns, wire, branches, buckets, bags of cement and a dozen low, wooden trays, which would contain our woodsy arrangements.
We met outside Melbourne’s Royal Exhibition Buildings, which I have always liked (even though I sat my HSC English exam in it). As befitting its World Heritage listing, it’s big, Victorian and very, very precious.
We gazed in awe at the beautiful fan-shaped façade and the famous gold-topped dome, copied from Florence’s renaissance cathedral. The youngest among us wondered: where’s the front door?
Inside, curved backdrops subdivided the huge space. Each exhibitor had its own, small stage. Along the walls and in side corridors, square, raised areas resembled window displays. It was up to us, and several hundred others, to make something eye-catching, technically correct and florally wonderful. (I think we all succeeded, but there are fashions in floristry and the prizewinners evidently had that extra zhoosh.)
We set to work amid warnings about cleaning up water spills; our preparations included the covering of each surface of our space with two layers of industrial plastic.
Then we had to locate our water tap. It was beneath a trapdoor in the priceless floor. (How much water do you need for an exhibit three metres by two? An awful lot; I hope it was grey water.)
Setting up involved crawling around on wet, newly laid turf, wrapping bits of moss around pots and filling our wooden trays with autumnal accents using ivy, Ming fern, Smokebush (Conospermum sp.), gum, Xavier grass, Echinacea flower heads and fluffy Green Trick, first cousin to Sweet William.
We mixed rapid-set cement to keep our seven birch trees upright in their buckets. We placed our seven, giant plaster eggs artfully within the scene. We constructed a natural-looking chunk of forest wilderness in a 130-year-old building in the heart of Carlton.
Result: a wet bum, dirty knees and one flesh wound from a secateur slip. Our teacher worried that we wouldn’t make it onto TV; I wondered how anything would survive for five days under the hot lights.
Around us, the Great Hall of Floristry was an obsessive, meticulous world. People laboured around the clock, hauling in logs, huge, flower-filled brackets and arranging hundreds of tiny test tubes, each housing a single stem.
Displays were constructed around the themes of weddings, the colour red, winning Tattslotto and having IVF. Outsized table settings ranged from the magnificent (Baroque) to the wacky (the Mad Hatter).
There were mountains of hardware, with as much chicken wire, glue, paint and fabric as flowers. There were endless boxes of Oasis (florists’ foam), trucked in by the pallet on speeding forklifts. Every exhibit’s flowers stood in buckets to one side, ready, like an afterthought, for when the infrastructure was complete.
I wasn’t the only one who cut themselves. But when I sought a Band-Aid in the sick bay, there were only three left. It’s a cut-throat, cut-finger business, floristry.
Nothing could help those in the traffic jams outside either, as nursery staff waited in line for access to their allotted space at the adjoining garden show. Inside and out, the place was like a small town under construction.
MIFGS is exciting, impressive and prestigious; everything you could want in a major event. I was privileged to spend time behind the scenes. As the venue for Australia’s first Parliament, captured memorably by Tom Roberts, it was a great place for a flower show.
I went back to see how everything looked on the last day: the “Victorian bushfire” pieces, the stunning displays of Ikebana, roses, tropical plants and “fashion” made from flowers.
In scale, variety and ambition, it was overwhelming but our eggs-in-a-forest exhibit held its own. I mingled with the crowd, and every overheard comment was positive.
It was a small triumph for Certificate II in Floristry, and not a bouquet or florist’s bow in sight.
Horticultural Media Association of Victoria essay competition, Shortlisted, 2009
Why would I, a sensible, mature writer enrol in Floristry at TAFE College (Technical and Further Education)? To cop painful, blistered fingers from wiring flowers? To practice tying impressive florists’ bows, over and over? To make exquisite floral arrangements and clean slimy buckets (often in succession)?I guess it was something to do with the beauty and transience of flowers, those precious, living jewels. I wanted to be around them and people who love them. Frankly, I also wanted to get a job away from my computer screen.
Each time I entered a florist’s, I was struck by the mysterious nature of their craft. Florists seemed to make arrangements and elaborate wrappings with a magician’s sleight of hand. I would watch them intently and still never comprehend how they managed to make a bouquet or box of flowers look so special.
When it came to the course, I thought it would be a matter of learning a few tricks; that floristry would be a doddle. How hard could it be, talking to people all day and wrapping bunches of beautiful blooms? At the Melbourne International Flower & Garden Show (MIFGS) in March this year, I learned otherwise. I was introduced to the brilliance and excess of exhibition floristry and learned how dirty, tiring and repetitive the world of flowers could be.
As it happened, for several weeks beforehand, my class hadn’t arranged any flowers. Instead, we created white, plaster-covered papier-mache balloons. These were to be scattered in a stylised forest, complete with birch branches, grasses and turf.
The exhibit’s quirky nature was matched by our problems coating giant balloons in sticky, glue-dipped newspaper, followed by coats of plaster of Paris that repeatedly flaked off.
They were, um, “eggs”. Perhaps dinosaur or aliens’. Possibly a mutant Easter Bunny’s. Even our teacher wasn’t sure what they were. But once finished, they were transported to the venue together with vast amounts of stuff: tools, florist’s foam, glue guns, wire, branches, buckets, bags of cement and a dozen low, wooden trays, which would contain our woodsy arrangements.
We met outside Melbourne’s Royal Exhibition Buildings, which I have always liked (even though I sat my HSC English exam in it). As befitting its World Heritage listing, it’s big, Victorian and very, very precious.
We gazed in awe at the beautiful fan-shaped façade and the famous gold-topped dome, copied from Florence’s renaissance cathedral. The youngest among us wondered: where’s the front door?
Inside, curved backdrops subdivided the huge space. Each exhibitor had its own, small stage. Along the walls and in side corridors, square, raised areas resembled window displays. It was up to us, and several hundred others, to make something eye-catching, technically correct and florally wonderful. (I think we all succeeded, but there are fashions in floristry and the prizewinners evidently had that extra zhoosh.)
We set to work amid warnings about cleaning up water spills; our preparations included the covering of each surface of our space with two layers of industrial plastic.
Then we had to locate our water tap. It was beneath a trapdoor in the priceless floor. (How much water do you need for an exhibit three metres by two? An awful lot; I hope it was grey water.)
Setting up involved crawling around on wet, newly laid turf, wrapping bits of moss around pots and filling our wooden trays with autumnal accents using ivy, Ming fern, Smokebush (Conospermum sp.), gum, Xavier grass, Echinacea flower heads and fluffy Green Trick, first cousin to Sweet William.
We mixed rapid-set cement to keep our seven birch trees upright in their buckets. We placed our seven, giant plaster eggs artfully within the scene. We constructed a natural-looking chunk of forest wilderness in a 130-year-old building in the heart of Carlton.
Result: a wet bum, dirty knees and one flesh wound from a secateur slip. Our teacher worried that we wouldn’t make it onto TV; I wondered how anything would survive for five days under the hot lights.
Around us, the Great Hall of Floristry was an obsessive, meticulous world. People laboured around the clock, hauling in logs, huge, flower-filled brackets and arranging hundreds of tiny test tubes, each housing a single stem.
Displays were constructed around the themes of weddings, the colour red, winning Tattslotto and having IVF. Outsized table settings ranged from the magnificent (Baroque) to the wacky (the Mad Hatter).
There were mountains of hardware, with as much chicken wire, glue, paint and fabric as flowers. There were endless boxes of Oasis (florists’ foam), trucked in by the pallet on speeding forklifts. Every exhibit’s flowers stood in buckets to one side, ready, like an afterthought, for when the infrastructure was complete.
I wasn’t the only one who cut themselves. But when I sought a Band-Aid in the sick bay, there were only three left. It’s a cut-throat, cut-finger business, floristry.
Nothing could help those in the traffic jams outside either, as nursery staff waited in line for access to their allotted space at the adjoining garden show. Inside and out, the place was like a small town under construction.
MIFGS is exciting, impressive and prestigious; everything you could want in a major event. I was privileged to spend time behind the scenes. As the venue for Australia’s first Parliament, captured memorably by Tom Roberts, it was a great place for a flower show.
I went back to see how everything looked on the last day: the “Victorian bushfire” pieces, the stunning displays of Ikebana, roses, tropical plants and “fashion” made from flowers.
In scale, variety and ambition, it was overwhelming but our eggs-in-a-forest exhibit held its own. I mingled with the crowd, and every overheard comment was positive.
It was a small triumph for Certificate II in Floristry, and not a bouquet or florist’s bow in sight.
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