Mixed messages at show

GOLDEN AWARD: The disturbed surfaces of Andy Ellis and Danny Kamo's The Last Laugh, represent equally disturbing challenges to garden owners, designers, and their suppliers.

MESSAGE FOR PEACE: Carl Pickens with one of the messages for improving the world on a bottle from the encircling inner fence of his Peace by Piece garden, this one from 9-year-old Ishbel Offer, of Lyttelton: "Be welcoming to everyone and respect their ideas."

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There's a mixed message at the Ellerslie Flower Show.

On the one hand it offers the commercial fairground of plants, tools, furnishings, building materials and every kind of garden flibbertigibbet going.

It's blatantly about buying and selling stuff. Beautiful, tempting stuff, but all about consumerism as per usual.

On the other hand, there are the exhibition gardens, where, overwhelmingly, designers are engaging with the environmental issues of now and ever more urgently of the future.

This year their aesthetics were framed by issues of sustainability, with materials drawn from sustainable sources, maybe recycled, and certainly recyclable.

Their message was blunt: "We can't go on living and wastefully consuming natural resources as we currently do."

This was most expressed in the gold award garden The Last Laugh, designed by landscape architect student (and All Black) Andy Ellis and John Kamo, which offered literally crushing criticism of current popular garden practices. Their composition of lawn, decking and pond has been smacked into disarray by a large boulder and satellite rocks (still steaming from the impact), representing Mother Earth fighting back against human impact on the planet. They targeted use of hardwood timbers from non-sustainable sources, the squandering of water and use of exotic potential pest plants.

Equally challenging was Craig Pocock's 0800 Pool Hire leisure complex created from industrial and waste materials. The shell of a freight container served as a stylish pavilion, with high-sided rubbish skips as brightly coloured pools, the water circulating through gravel-filled smaller skips planted with bulrushes for chemical-free filtration.

The background graffiti-art sprayed recycled fence by Project Legit (which offers tag artists a legitimate mainstream art outlet) added hard-edged social comment to the exhibit, as did references to the loss of school swimming pools and to attitudes to waste disposal. The material accompanying this exhibit asserted this is the way of the future, in which planners will be accountable for the energy intensity of their designs. Plants alone cannot off-set the energy consumed in the manufacture of concrete, so widely used without consideration of its environmental implications.

Carl Pickens' Peace by Piece was less in-your-face challenging, but also deeply rooted in sustainable thinking.

He solicited thoughts on how to make the world a better place, and volunteers transcribed these responses on to discarded glass bottles. These were inserted into high curved wooden walls defining a flower-shaped garden with an overflowing bowl of Oamaru quartz at its heart, representative of a hope that thought leads to positive action.

Many gardens also focused on edible plants, demonstrating that practical use does not have to sacrifice beauty or usability of the outdoors. In these terms, the two international designers, Koji Ninomiya with his dry Zen garden and Chris Beardsmore's English Gentleman's Retreat were still working very much in traditional aesthetics. Beautiful, rich in meanings, including the invitation to contemplate the beauties of nature.

Undoubtedly, a joy to those who go to a flower show expecting to see mainly flowers, most especially those die-hard conservatives who don't see native New Zealand plants as garden plants.

There's plenty for them anyway, especially in the gloriously old-fashioned competitive bedding displays put on by various local authorities. But then, a commercial venture such as Ellerslie must offer something for everyone. Especially the garden shopaholic. wThe Ellerslie Flower Show is on at Hagley Park in Christchurch until tomorrow.

- © Fairfax NZ News