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KIRK HARGREAVES/The Press

BLOWN AWAY: Operations manager Jeremy Hawker's Botanic Gardens team won the Supreme Award at the Ellerslie Flower Show yesterday with Pictures of Life and Death.

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A team of Christchurch council workers beat international competition to the supreme award at the Ellerslie International Flower Show with a garden of mushrooms, moss and lichen.

Judges said the Pictures of Life and Death garden created by the Christchurch City Council's Botanic Gardens staff was an extraordinary exhibit that the public would be "blown away" by.

Jeremy Hawker, the Botanic Gardens operations manager who headed the 15-strong exhibit team, was blown away himself after receiving the top award at the show in Christchurch's North Hagley Park last night.

"We certainly didn't expect to win. We didn't enter to win; just to give it our best and to have the chance for the Botanic Gardens team to show their skills," he said.

Visitors to the garden enter through a "glow-worm" cave and their first view is through a 2.5-metre-high waterfall.

An array of fungi (some picked in the wild last weekend), lichen, moss, liverwort and ferns carpet the floor of the exhibit, which has a six-minute cycle of changing lights and sounds.

Judge Penny Cliffin said the garden had an amazing array of fungi and an "interesting commentary on decomposition as a basis of life under the ground".

Hawker got the inspiration partly from his mouldy coffee cup.

"It had all these colours and textures, and I thought let's run with that."

He said taking the supreme award was humbling because the standard of the other entries was so high.

The exhibit was a team effort, with help from a range of council staff, including Botanic Garden trainees, as well as external contractors, he said.

The council garden beat entries from award-winning Chelsea Flower Show designer Chris Beardshaw, Japanese designer Koji Ninomiya, who both won gold for their exhibition gardens, as did All Black Andy Ellis for his and Danny Kamo's exhibit about human impact on the environment.

- © Fairfax NZ News