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Priority Order Line Leamington Spa 01926 424826 - Inspirational Flowers, Champagne, Chocolates, - Priority Order Line 01926 424826
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The people of Girona, a small town on the eastern part of the French/Spanish border, take flowers very seriously. They convert their entire city into a floral artwork once a year.
The medieval Catalan city of Girona was
the setting for this amazing project by
Pandoras Box. I was thrilled when Niels Van Helmert invited me to work with him on
the design for this years exhibit. Niels lives in France so the challenge was to
work together by phone, E mail, web cam and MSN, Niels lead the design concept,
‘Stairway to Heaven’ and Carles Fontanillas, last years designer, coordinated
the logistics.
We arrived at our exhibition space, the steps of San Marti on Wednesday, after marking out the design, we laid the turf and then set about welding the forms. This was my first experience of welding and the equipment is now top of my birthday list, what an exciting avenue this skill opens up! The greatest challenge here was to ensure that the forms were bowing over at the correct angle. The solution … strategic marks on the floor and brute force!
By now we had around 35 florists working on the project, 6 of us Brits and the rest, French, Spanish and Catalan, we all spoke ‘floral’ so the language barriers were no problem.
Foam spheres, straight willow and moss were used to create the heads of the structures, 10 in all. Once we had set a team working on these we deployed another team to wind and wire locally gathered clematis vine around the welded structures. I then set about using the off cuts of the willow to give a contrasting texture on some of the structures, once perfected I shared the technique with another team. I then moved on to the 4 smaller, straight structures which were to be placed on the low walls at the base of the steps, these were created using tillandsia, gypsophillia, cymbidiums and once more clematis and willow.
The hardest part both physically and mentally was erecting the structures, boy did we learn about ‘actual balance.’ All of the time we were setting up inquisitive visitors were walking up and down the steps, stepping over and through our work. For their safety we wired the structures to the balcony’s running either side of the steps.
The final touch was to place orchids and germini in tubes through the turf and weave vines over them, by Friday afternoon the steps were transformed in to a ‘stairway to heaven’.
Sarah L Horne, AIFD