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.

After a hotter than usual, drier than usual summer (putting it mildly), and a wetter than usual, colder than usual (again understating it) winter, who knows what this spring will turn out to be? Our confusion is compounded in that many of the plants here went in just 14 months ago, so we don’t really know their habits, even under normal conditions.

Stan Powers, gardening magus, moved our few grape hyacinths (Muscari armeniacum, we think) and set our expectations low for this year’s bloom – and that was before all the weather drama. But we do, in fact, have several in bloom now. People say they’re too puny to enjoy except in “a large drift,” and of course large drifts of them would be dandy, but we’re enjoying our scattered five or six clumps and can see them twinkling like sapphires even from the curb.

Neighbor Beverly Bajema sent us this heavenly close-up of a muscari blooming outside her dance studio a few blocks away. Beverly has a way with parsley, night blooming cereus, and much more. Thank you, dear and talented birthday-mate.

Mo’Nique looked the part of a winner last night, with three lovely white gardenias knotted onto her up-do. The actress, who won the Oscar for her harrowing “supporting” role in the movie Precious,  paid tribute to Hattie McDaniel, the first African American to be nominated for, and win, an Academy Award. Dressed in royal blue as McDaniel had been 70 years before, Mo’Nique explained, “This is the flower Hattie McDaniel wore when she accepted her Oscar. So for you, Miss Hattie McDaniel, it’s about time the world feels you all over them.”

Actually, it was McDaniel who, gloriously, felt flowers all over herself on February 29, 1940, as she won the Oscar for her portrayal of “Mammy” in Gone with the Wind. You can see and hear her acceptance speech. Or just delight in the photo below, her casque of gardenias AND the major floral stole over her right shoulder.

Congratulations, Mo’Nique. And next time, we hope you spring for the whole fragrant costume.

Hattie McDaniel won the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for her work in Gone with the Wind, February 29, 1940. Fay Bainter, right, presented the award.
Photo: via Afrocity Blog

What made us cave in to her latest publicity stunt was its classic use of flowers: simultaneously to draw attention and to mask. LG’s oversized black rose (see Waylon Jennings for the symbolism on that one) obscured not only her face but her vision. So much so that, despite her costume’s edginess,it required a very ordinary looking and patient bald fellow to get her safely down a few steps and into a cab.

Who says the age of gallantry—or the culture of flowers—is dead?

Lady Gaga and an unnamed escort set out for the
MAV Viva Glam Launch Monday in London

There are plenty of artists who “deploy” flowers these days as a medium for ephemeral sculpture or conceptual statement. Having seen some such pieces (where the floral elements might as well have been paint or even plastic), we applaud all the more how these designers have rooted wit, conception, and aesthetics in understanding. Their installations are rich with perspectives on floral anatomy and commerce, as well as the human fantasies (a.k.a. customs) that put blooms to work.
See Virginia A. Smith’s extended report and an excellent slideshow from the Philadelphia Enquirer. And if you make the show, please let us know if the conceptualists of MODA flexed your neurons.

The Philadelphia International Flower Show runs February 28-March 7.

Visitors at the Philadelphia International Flower Show look into one of MODA Botanica’s shipping containers
Photo: Akira Suwa, for Philadelphia Enquirer