Floristry is always there for the special occasions. Flowers show love for Valentine’s Day and birthdays; they glam up weddings and they soothe at funerals. It is an ever-changing industry responding creatively to water shortages, as constant as fashion and as diverse as the seasons.
We even have a whole month devoted to flowers and industry updates. Each year, Floriade provides florists with new ideas and informative talks. Each festival of flowers kicks off with a CIT fashion competition and display, allowing our floristry students to show us new and inventive ways to build apparel out of banana leaves and banksia flowers. Cleverly arranging them and utilising industry standards (such as the water-saving use of floral foam) in unusual shapes and places.
During the festival listeners are taught how to cut flowers so they last longer and how to use Australia’s native flora, interspersing leaves and proudly displaying our interesting flowers to highlight their unique shapes and colours.
All year round Canberra’s many florists work hard to make events and even regular days special with flower arrangements. Braddon’s Moxom + Whitney take unique to a new level, using their years of experience in their designs and even teaching classes and spreading their knowledge. Their creativity extends into the art of terrariums, incorporating little figurines of people and animals into leafy worlds, playing with size shape and of course with Australia’s native plants.
For more flowers and a different style, Rockabilly Floral Lane has a place of its own over in the south side suburb of Richardson. In this workshop flowers become animals, they live in cages and they even take a ride on a Ferris wheel. These arrangements are surprising, they are cute and they are quirky. White flowers and strategically placed bows and eyes create a floral puppy so realistic you want to pick it up and cuddle it. Vases and other flower receptacles are many and varied, including small bunches of flowers on multiple levels in the same piece.
Unfortunately cut flowers don’t last forever but at Absolutely Unreal, arrangements remain as fresh after a month as the day they arrived. These flowers look so real but they’re not! The hassle of watering and replacing flowers is dealt with in these beautifully designed pieces. They will mellow offices and brighten homes for much longer than the average stems, while still utilising floristry techniques of differing levels, front view and multiple view arrangements and inspiring colour and shape combinations.
Canberra is a cornucopia of floristry. Ranging in style and abundant in creativity, we are spoiled for choice. From the little worlds of terrariums to animals born from flowers and blooms that last forever, we can enjoy flowers all year around and not just on those special occasions!
