We have the Ellerslie Flower Show on in the city at the moment. This is a big "gardening" show that gets oodles of hype and publicity, and you can tell by my sarcastic inverted commas that I don't like it.
It's based on the Chelsea Flower Show with show gardens put together for the occasion, and lots of vendors selling their wares. Christchurch mayor Bob Parker bought the show from Auckland, for a large sum of money, to bring in more tourist dollars to the local economy. Ellerslie is the name of a suburb in Auckland from where the show originated. There is no suburb called Ellerslie in Christchurch; we bought the name as part of the 'branding'. There used to be a pleasant little show called Gardenz here, run by a local family. That was well and truly blindsided by the bigger, mayorally-backed event.
It's $40 to go in, which I think is an outrageous sum of money. You, the customer, are basically paying for the opportunity to be marketed to, like brand-name sports or product clothing. (You pay $30 dollars for a Coca-cola T-shirt, so that you can pay to advertise their product for them). People assume that because I'm a keen gardener I'll be off like a shot to the Flower Show. No. The show gardens this year seem low on plants, and long on things like cocktail bars, barbeques and plywood constructions. Boring. If I want to see these things, I'll go next door to Les Nouveaux Riches.
For all the hype, Ellerslie is just a trade show. As a colleague said so aptly, "It's all so contrived". And getting further and further away from gardening and more into the realms of what could be called exterior decorating, with little evidence of style, taste or knowledge, the main aim being to flog goods and services. I think we now need an off-Ellerslie or Ellerslie Fringe festival, preferably in early summer, when there's generally more in flower than in autumn and the plants are in better condition. A garden festival with plants, there's an idea.
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