Garden Festival
A garden / flora festival or exposition is a festival and exposition held to celebrate the arts of gardening, garden design, landscaping and landscape architecture. There are local garden festivals, regional garden festivals, National Garden Festivals and International Garden Festivals. The idea probably originated with Germany's Bundesgartenschau. The UK held five garden festivals in the period 1984-92 but blundered through not planning an after-use for the festival grounds during their design and planning phase.
To qualify as an International Exhibition, a show must be recognised by the Bureau International des Expositions (BIE), which was established by a diplomatic international Convention, signed in Paris,in 1928. Shows can also be recognised by the International Association of Horticultural Producers (IAHP / AIPH). To qualify as a National Exhibition, a garden festival must be recognised by a national government.
Because garden design is becoming more popular and featuring on TV, there is an ever-growing number of garden festivals: permanent and temporary, official and non-official. One of the best known is International Garden Festival held on a permanent site at Chaumont in France. Despite the name, Chaumont does not come within the BIE definition of an 'international' festival. Other shows feature garden design but describe themselves as 'flower shows'. The best-known example in this category, the Chelsea Flower Show, emphasises garden design. It spun off a Chelsea Fringe events in 2012 which featured a variety of unusual gardens and gardening across London.
The last International Garden Festival is 2010 Taipei International Flora Exposition (2010 Flora Expo), it's open on November 6, 2010 to April 25, 2011 in Taipei, Republic of China (Taiwan).
Read more about Garden Festival: List of Host Nations and Cities
Famous quotes containing the words garden and/or festival:
“I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And ‘Thou shalt not’ writ over the door;”
—William Blake (1757–1827)
“Don’t you know there are 200 temperance women in this county who control 200 votes. Why does a woman work for temperance? Because she’s tired of liftin’ that besotted mate of hers off the floor every Saturday night and puttin’ him on the sofa so he won’t catch cold. Tonight we’re for temperance. Help yourself to them cloves and chew them, chew them hard. We’re goin’ to that festival tonight smelling like a hot mince pie.”
—Laurence Stallings (1894–1968)