Three million flowers and one hungry plant

Australians take their flowers seriously. 

In Melbourne, more than 100,000 people descend on the Royal Exhibition Building and Carlton Gardens for the Melbourne International Flower & Garden Show, inspecting elaborate show gardens and floral installations with the concentration normally reserved for property auctions and football finals.

Sydney has its own floral obsessions: the venerable Sydney Royal Flower & Garden Show, a Show tradition since 1929, with horticultural competitions dating back to 1869, and, at the time of writing, the Sydney Cherry Blossom Festival, running from 22–30 August, when Auburn Botanic Gardens turns pink and Sydneysiders discover a sudden and urgent need to photograph themselves beneath a tree.

So, arriving in Tel Aviv, I thought I understood flower shows. I did not. 

FLOWERS: A Journey Between Worlds, currently occupying Expo Tel Aviv, contains more than three million flowers arranged across five themed worlds: Water, Galaxy, Mirrors, Fairy Tales and Amusement.

Three million flowers is a lot of flowers. At some point, surely, a sensible person must have suggested that two million was plenty?

The exhibition is billed by its organisers as Israel’s largest flower exhibition and follows an earlier incarnation that attracted more than 150,000 visitors.

This year it returned bigger, with another 1,000 square metres added to the exhibition space. Some flowers are Israeli-grown; others, including unusual varieties not grown locally, have been flown in from overseas.

But describing FLOWERS as a flower show is a little like describing Disneyland as a collection of buildings. It is technically true, but it doesn’t quite prepare you for what is coming.

The flowers, for a start, have escaped the confines of vases.

They have become fish, swans, cats, planets, enormous fantasy landscapes and a gigantic orange octopus with sprawling blue tentacles. Nearby is a clownfish constructed from orange and white blooms, looking rather like Finding Nemo has been taken over by an extremely enthusiastic florist. There is a carousel smothered in flowers, a storybook village, a witch and strange illuminated botanical planets. Then there are mirrors multiplying the displays, presumably because somebody looked at three million flowers and thought: not enough.

And then there was my personal favourite. Among millions of blooms competing shamelessly for attention sat a Nepenthes, or tropical pitcher plant. It was not particularly colourful. It wasn’t enormous. It didn’t resemble an octopus. It simply ate things. The plant produces hanging pitchers containing digestive fluid. An insect lands on the slippery edge, tumbles inside and discovers that its decision-making process has gone badly wrong. I loved it immediately.

Perhaps this says something troubling about me, but amid three million beautiful flowers, I became emotionally attached to the homicidal one. 

There were Australian natives too — proteas and bottlebrushes, but what interested me most was the sheer confidence of the exhibition.

Nothing about it whispers, although, to be fair, Israel rarely whispers. The exhibition was originally intended to open around Pesach but was postponed because of the security situation. 

Israel is a country we have become accustomed to seeing through a particular visual vocabulary: soldiers, protests, hostage posters, politicians, sirens and funerals.

All of those images tell real stories, but they are not the entire story. There are also families wandering through fantasy gardens, children staring open-mouthed at fish made from thousands of flowers, and grown women who had clearly understood the assignment better than I had, arriving in full fairy dresses with magic wands. And yes, of course I regretted leaving mine at home.

At the end was a flower-crown-making room, where you could cut flowers from paper, colour them in and construct something to wear on your head.

There is probably an age at which one is supposed to lose interest in making paper crowns. Apparently, I haven’t reached it. I made mine, put it on and walked happily back out into Tel Aviv looking like a middle-aged flower fairy who had taken a wrong turn somewhere. It was a wonderfully frivolous way to end the exhibition.   

There is something quietly defiant about putting three million flowers in a building during a difficult Israeli summer, and then sending people back out into the world wearing crowns.

Flowers are absurdly temporary things. Think about it, they bloom magnificently and then despite any care we give them, they die. Perhaps that is why we give them to mark love, grief, weddings and Shabbat tables and it also makes FLOWERS a fitting lead-up to Rosh Hashanah, when we look back, take stock and begin again, and usher in a sweeter year.

After everything Israel has endured, there is something moving about millions of flowers in one colourful space. A reminder that after one season comes another and, with luck, another chance as well. Or, in Tel Aviv’s case, three million chances. One of them shaped like an octopus.

Sharon Tidhar is a writer and observer.