Floriade Expo 2022 – Growing Green Cities

Today was our ‘once in a lifetime’ trip to the Floriade. It’s been held every 10 years since 1952 and we thought ‘it’s now or never’. The site was a short ride along dedicated cycle routes – shall we stop mentioning how lovely cycling is over here? To add to our joy, there were blue skies and the biggest breakfast buffet ever!

Anyway, how to describe the Floriade? It’s like an RHS flower show on a significantly larger scale with less attention to perfection and a greater focus on both environment and sustainability. It has been on since April and finishes in 3 weeks, some of the exhibits are tired and/or closed. Saying that, it was well worth the visit. The two giant figures greeting visitors are covered with 10,000 corten steel bees, setting the tone for our visit

When the exhibition finishes, much will remain as infrastructure and green spaces for a residential development planned over the next few years. There are paths and roads already in place as well as existing mature trees that have been incorporated into the layout. Some of it seemed a little strange and disjointed until we understood what we were experiencing.

The theme around caring for your environment and building spaces for communities whilst support health and well-being was evident and the planting was humming with wildlife. There is a 3.2km bee corridor around the exhibition which is planted to ensure there is something to pollinators and birds throughout the year.

On our way out, we detoured into the Greenhouse. There were some colourful displays of indoor plants as well as rooms filled with foliage. We were rather puzzled by an IKEA display cabinet padlocked shut. John thought it was a safety issue until we noticed it was the only one in a long line of cabinets. Then we saw two cameras recording us and read the accompanying notice. The solitary plant inside was a Monstera minima variegata, the most expensive houseplant ever sold with one selling for almost $20,000 at auction. The phrase ‘more money than sense’ springs to mind.

There is only so much time you can spend at an exhibition this vast so, this afternoon, we drove north to Lelystad to see Anthony Gormley’s ‘Exposure’ a steel structure that resembles a crouching human figure looking out over the Markermeer. But the closer you get the more abstract it becomes, once you reach its feet – your head are at only ankle height and you can see the structure is made from straight sections of Scottish power pylons that resemble the straight roads and canals in the area. The concept relates to being a fixed point in a moving world and as climate change causes sea levels to rise, the dike it is built on will be raised, slowly burying the work.