Garden delights
World horticultural expo wows visitors with sensational displays, creative ideas and unexpected treats
Steve Whysall fi lls us in on the leg of his European odyssey that took him from Amsterdam to Bruges.
BRUGES, THE NETHERLANDS – I have just spent a week travelling from Amsterdam to Bruges, visiting some of the best gardens in Holland and Belgium as well as time at Floriade, the world horticultural expo in Venlo, held only once every 10 years. Here are the highlights of my European garden odyssey, starting with my time at Floriade: This amazing horticultural extravaganza turned out to be a glorious gardening exposition, full of sensational displays, creative landscaping ideas and all sorts of sensory surprises. It was totally unexpected, for instance, to turn a corner and find a tree wearing a sweater. Or to walk into a water garden and find furniture that looked like granite that turned out to be made of foam rubber. It was a delight, too, to sit at a sushi- style conveyor belt and be invited to pick off products that could either be tasted ( cheese, herb dishes, heritage tomatoes) or felt ( sheep’s wool, stone products, bulbs) or keep and taken home as a present ( forget- me- not seeds, miniature plant pots or squeezable egg designed to relieve stress). It was interesting to walk through a series of 15 innovative small- spaced gardens, each with a novel idea, such as a lunch time play space for office workers or an courtyard food garden planted whimsically with nothing but asparagus. And it was a particularly stimulating sensory treat to walk along a path through dense woodland that was wired for sound. Short bursts of music or spoken words or weird unfamiliar sounds added a sense of the surreal to the mystery of the forest and heightened the experience of a walk through a wood with all its comforting as well as unnerving characteristics.
Spread over a 66- hectare site, Floriade, which opened in April and runs until Oct. 7, also featured some impressive architecture, such as a wavy steel and glass entrance, stylish bridge and large amphitheatre. But none of this compared to the sleek, spacious contemporary landscaping that greets you on the inside where immense reflecting ponds and wide paths and a colourful sweeping tapestry of flowers in long curving borders define and separate five themed zones. People go to Floriade to be wowed. They want to see things they haven’t seen before or can’t see anywhere else. The wow factor is there in buckets. Or, rather, I should say the wow factor is there in baskets – dozens of brightly coloured plastic shopping bags packed with gerberas and other flowers, bringing a whimsical new slant to the term “hanging basket”. From massive ball of daisies to gigantic grass sofa, Floriade has a lot of entertaining features. There were movie- theatre pavilions where you could experience being swallowed by a flower or stand in the dark and watch the world turn under your feet as you go from country to country to see horticulture at work. Corten steel with its rusty orange patina was featured everywhere, for large tree containers, raised planters mass planted with red- orange foliage heucheras, and even used as the material for a caravan in a garden with a group of topiary cyclists made out of tightly bended strips of Chinese privet ( Ligustrum delavayanum). For an overview of the entire site you can jump into a cable car and fly in a few minutes from one end to the other. The excellent design of the garden is emphasized even more by being view from overhead. It is possible to criticize Floriade, but I could not stop thinking during my time there that it is such a wonderful, creative, unique effort – something you just don’t see even being attempted anywhere else in the world.
Captivated by the Keukenhof
Back in Amsterdam, I popped into the Holland’s most famous garden, the Keukenhof. I was worried that we might have left it a little late to catch the spectacular displays of spring- flowering bulbs. But I was worrying needlessly. The garden was outstanding, better than I could have imagined. There were sumptuous displays of tulips everywhere. When I visited the garden a few years ago, there were striking rivers of blue muscari and yellow daffodils. They were not there this time. But all the trees were fully leafed out this time and the brilliant sunshine streaming through the canopy of towering London planes to form lovely dappled shade in which rhododendrons and azaleas were blooming superbly along with tens of thousands of late- flowering tulips. In the main pavilions, I found amazing lily and orchid displays. Thousands of lilies were exquisitely woven together to form giant arching living sculptures. Orchids were used in equally creative displays in another pavilion where there were female mannequins dressed in dresses made of bark and eggshells as well as a bride with blue orchids decorating her train. In the garden, the stroll paths beside calm canal- like water courses were made even more picturesque by the addition of pretty boats moored along the banks. I was particularly impressed by a walled garden in which rows of Acer campestre had been beautifully pleached into narrow geometric wedges.
At the heart of flower power
In Aalsmeer, I was up bright and early to visit the world’s biggest flower auction, where more than 20 million flowers are auctioned off Dutch style every day and then rapidly distributed to flower shops and supermarkets all over Europe from London to Moscow. In a massive building ( said to be the fifth largest in the world), thousands of bins of flowers in a dazzling tapestry of colours are sold in a split second. Being a Dutch- style auction, the asking price starts highest and drops until someone in the buying- gallery decides to presses a button and stop the clock to complete the purchase. It is a super- speed process. Thousands of roses flown in from growers in Africa are sold in seconds. Then the trains of trolleys loaded with white buckets packed full of flowers are whisked away. The bustling scene looks almost as if it were an carefully choreographed modern dance piece with all the colours of the rainbow flashing on to the stage from left and right and darting in and out and around one another in mesmerizing patterns. This centre of flower power effects the world in big way every day through the millions of flowers that ultimately end up in homes, hotels, restaurants, hotels and offices all over Europe as bouquets and arrangements guaranteed to raise spirits with a splash of natural beauty.