There was a week-long flower show last week, and although I already went last year, I felt like going again. It just hit me that I hadn’t had any fresh air for maybe two weeks straight. The only fresh air I got was when I walked to or from my car in between places. The haze situation had been really bad in Borneo, so I actively avoided going outside where I could help it. I’m sure my lungs were very grateful for that.
I was too exhausted to go after work, so on the Sunday that was the last day of the exhibition, I packed my camera in my bag alongside my sheet music (Canon In D; a melody adapted for cello, not the repetitive same four-bars-on-loop nightmare) before my cello lesson. It was four in the afternoon when I dropped by on the way home after my cello lesson. It was fairly crowded, but manageable enough that I was able to just stand around and wait for people to just move along to get cleaner shots without aging in place.
(I’m still trying to find a good image optimiser that would allow me to upload photos here while preserving their clarity. When I lean in to peer at these photos on the blog, all I see is fuzzy pixels quite unlike in the freshly downloaded, delightfully crisp, raw HEIC files. I have no choice but to accept for the time being that manually resizing pictures from 6k px to 1k px before uploading them comes with a non-negotiable compromise in photo quality and that I can’t have my cake and eat it too.)
Anyway, moving on to the exhibition. I believe the floral and botanical arrangements were set up by the same plant nursery and landscaping co (RGC) that I wrote about here, though the vendors selling their plants inside seemed to be independent sellers.
Pretty in pink.
Above: I didn’t realise at the time this photo was taken, that the flowers were split into three different colours from left to right across the photo. There were misting nozzles set up all over the entrance and at poles throughout the inside of the park. I hadn’t anticipated that I would not be leaving the same park as dry as I was when entering it; I walked around the trail while shielding my precious camera with one hand. You can see where the mist spray begins on the right of the photo, around the tree trunk.
I was waiting for the perfect spray of mist to shoot across these flowers so I could take an artistic, Flickr-worthy sunset-backlit photo of them overlaid with a dreamy veil of mist particles, but looking at it now, I feel like this is just giving “I forgot to wipe my lens before pressing the shutter” LOL.
That alocasia (?) in the centre is bigger than it looks pictured. I’m pretty sure each leaf is as long as my entire arm.
More giant aroid content.
All I could think of was this delightful still of David Attenborough (original photo credit: no idea).
There were LED strips running along the curvature of the entrance.
Above: This is one of my favourite shots from the day. I find the geometry of the branches pleasing in a way I can’t explain.
I uploaded both the pictures above and below because despite being essentially the same, I couldn’t decide which one I’d rather upload. Ha.
Same, girl.
I took this as I was leaving after circling back to the entrance. It makes me think of a bit from Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being: “in the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia”. Even without the original context of the book in which it was written, it’s still relevant to a lot of things in life.
I really wish the local authorities would host more of these floral events, they have so much potential and they were done so well.