Tempest in a flower pot

By Mike Leidemann
Advertiser Staff Editor

Alison Manaut, left, and daughter Anne Hagar prepare their arrangement for the flower show. Overall, the show's floral design entries have tended toward the increasingly abstract in recent years. Richard Ambo • The Honolulu Advertiser

Yes, it's time once again for the Garden Club of Honolulu's big flower show.

To the thousands of people who will visit the three-day show, which opens today at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the flower show is a chance to ooh and aah over nature's carefully nurtured and tended beauty. For Garden Club members, though, the show is an enormous undertaking, an opportunity to show off their horticultural and flower-arranging skills and maybe earn bragging rights for the next three years.

For months now, the nearly 100 members of the club have been working alone, or sometimes in pairs, to come up with entries in more than a dozen competitive classes. Don't let the cute little categories — "Tiny Bubbles," "My Little Grass Shack," "Sweet Leilani" and "A Song of Old Hawai'i" — fool you, either. This is serious competition. Friendly, but serious.

Ever since the competitive classes were announced in October, members have been growing and gathering flowers and greenery, experimenting almost daily with arrangements and background materials, envisioning their final displays and worrying about what other competitors are doing.

"It's amazing how much difference there is among entries," said longtime Garden Club member Phyllis Guard. "Everyone is supposed to be a good gardener, but some entries really stand out."

Guard and Garden Club partner Margo Morgan, for instance, have been tinkering regularly with ideas for their entry in the "My Little Grass Shack" category, which is for miniature landscape scenes using live plants. Just two weeks before the show opened, their display on Morgan's Nu'uanu lanai was still a hodgepodge of lava rocks, miniature plants and a yet-to-jell final plan they didn't want to share with a reporter, for fear of tipping off other competitors in the same class.

"Nobody wants to tell the others in the club about what they're working on," Morgan said. "Oh, my, it's terribly competitive."

Especially in the horticulture classes, some plants just look better than others on the day of the show, no matter how carefully they've been watered, fertilized, sprayed or talked to. One year, almost all but two of the entries in a certain growing category died before the show; another year, one frustrated grower even sent in her completely dead plant to be judged.

"At least she had a sense of humor," Morgan said.

Although entries in the horticulture division tend to still be fairly traditional, floral arrangement styles have gotten wilder and wilder recently. Once rejected outright by judges, abstract arrangements have received more recognition and acceptability over the last 20 years. Now, many of the entries don't include any live plant material at all.

Alison Manaut and her daughter Anne Hagar, for instance, use gathered palm parts, dry leaves and bits of coral rock — all spray-painted fluorescent blue, green and purple — for their creation in the "Beyond the Reef" category.

"Twenty-five years ago nobody would have dreamed of using that type of material and being that abstract," Manaut said. "Gradually, the designs became more and more contemporary, more and more far out, and much more sculptural." These days you might find copper wire, plastic bowls, plexiglas sheeting, bits of broken ceramics, and just about anything else in the show's flower arrangements.

"We're always keeping our eyes out as we drive around for things we might use in the arrangement," Hagar said. "Sometimes you just have to stop the car to collect something somebody has thrown out."

The flower arrangers, too, work and rework their entries constantly.

"Design, movement, texture, color all go into creating the right arrangement," Manaut said. "The work is constantly changing right up until the day of the show. You add something, you take something away. You never give up until the final moment."

Participants began moving their entries into the Academy of Arts on Wednesday, where they were rated by more than 35 Garden Club of America-approved judges from across the United States who were flown to Hawai'i for the event, which occurs only every three years.

In addition to the judged categories, this year's show also features two educational exhibits on endangered native plants of Hawai'i and on the threat posed by alien bugs. A special display in the Academy's Central Court, just inside the main entrance, will be built around a "Hawai'i Calls" theme, honoring the old radio show that originated in the Islands. A separate exhibit by the Cactus and Succulent Society of America also will be on display during the show.

The Garden Club of Honolulu, which limits invited members to about 100 at a time, was founded in 1930 and promotes gardening and horticulture among its members and the public with a variety of shows, educational programs and classes.

You can contact Mike Leidemann by e-mail at MLeidemann@honoluluadvertiser.com.