Flowers out of flowers

With each passing year, more and more people are visiting the traditional flower exhibition on Independence Day. On Ukraine’s 15

th birthday, Kyiv’s Pechersk Landscape Park was chock-a-block with visitors eager to acquire a plant — a live one or, at worst, an artificial plant. The latter variety is very popular: most visitors were leaving the show with multicolored stick-on balloons or spiral-shaped sticks, rather than seedling pots. Since there is no accounting for taste, visitors could buy everything on the park avenues — from striped daisies and hairy cactuses to potted palms and newspaper-wrapped saplings. This riot of plants was only a prelude to the floral extravaganza staged by Kyivzelenbud.

The word “extravaganza” will not seem too exalted to those who visit the exhibition. This year’s theme is paintings by well-known artists and their lesser known brethren. Although the park designers faced some difficulties in the early stages of organizing the exhibition, they implemented their project brilliantly: at any rate, visitors were simply amazed.

Can you imagine an easel several meters high, on which flowers have been placed in a vase? (Kyiv’s park designers have long been creating horizontal as well as vertical compositions.) Next to the easel are huge brushes and color tubes also made of flowers. Spectators were exclaiming in surprise when they saw this creation or the glass aquarium filled with fish made of flowers.

Another picture showed sparrows fashioned out of flowers. “The level of designing with flowers is rising,” says Kyiv’s landscape architect Oksana Dzhun, the exhibit’s organizer and inspirer. “This work requires painstaking mastery to handle every tiny flower. Everyone can see how to lay out flowers in their own garden. Kyiv has a very strong school of park designers, and these traditions have been handed down from generation to generation. The finest masters worked on this exhibition.”

The organizers make sure that these floral compositions appear in the capital not just on holidays. After all, there is no reason why Kyiv’s stationary flower beds shouldn’t be festively decorated all the time. On the eve of the feast of Transfiguration (“the Honey Feast of Our Savior”) was approaching, flower beds in the shape of honeybees with symbolic apiaries nearby appeared on one of Kyiv’s avenues.