Human Flower Project
Bellephobia
“Pictures of Life and Death,” gold medal winner at the 2010 Ellerslie Flower Show in New Zealand, features fungus
Photo: The Press
We realize that many people consider flowers a guilty pleasure. Jack Goody’s fascinating study The Culture of Flowers considers a long history of “deliberate rejection.”
But at a flower show? Yes. Political correctness, an ethos of “green” (but apparently no other colors), late-minimalism, conceptualism, and what we shall call “bellephobia” have conspired against blossoms at the Ellerslie Flower Show. The gold medal winner of New Zealand’s premier floral exhibition is a display of fungus: “a lighting and sound extravaganza illustrating how nature recycles.”
Christchurch Botanic Gardens was awarded the Supreme Award for its entry called “Pictures of Life and Death.” We understand that Jeremy Hawker, the Botanic Gardens’ operations manager, received his inspiration “partly from his mouldy coffee cup.” Juliet Speedy reports: “Visitors to the garden enter through a ‘glow-worm’ cave” and first see the display through an 8 ft. waterfall.
Jeremy Hawker of Christchurch Botanic Gardens was inspired by a dirty coffee cup
Photo: Kirk Hargreaves, for The Press
“An array of fungi (some picked in the wild last weekend), lichen, moss, liverwort and ferns carpet the floor of the exhibit, which has a six-minute cycle of changing lights and sounds.” Of note: this award was bestowed in the Starlight Marquee division, for entries that feature “how lighting can extend enjoyment of a garden after dark.”
Here in the U.S., bellephobia has been evident at the Philadelphia Flower Show, too. The big winner there was MODA Botanica’s entry, featuring floral installations inside graffiti-laden industrial containers.
MODA’s blossoms were displayed off-kilter and encased within metallic and hyper-urban cocoons, but they were in fact flowers and—dare we say it?—pretty.
New Zealand appears to be on the cutting edge of garden design, and that edge is mossy and decomposing.