Visit Ellerslie flower show early

TRULY AMAZING: The Christchurch Botanic Gardens gold-medal winning exhibit in the Starlight Marquee.

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.

Fantastic Flowers

Relevant offers

New Zealand

Qantas cuts Auckland-LA route 176,245 fly into Wellington airport An island recovered First Church treasure 36 hours in Wanaka Tourists flock in, but Kiwis flee to Australia Migration figures to turnaround - report Small panel falls off during Jetstar flight Cycling Marlborough's vineyards National mosaic of cycleways

Head for the Ellerslie International Flower Show tomorrow morning because Christchurch's weather will turn downright nasty in the afternoon.

An active cold front will sweep across Canterbury about lunchtime tomorrow bringing plunging temperatures, a spell of steady rain, strong southerly winds and even a chance of thunderstorms with small hail.

MetService predictions are that the rain will set in after 1pm and conditions will be at their worst between about 4pm and 7pm tomorrow before clearing around midnight.  

Friday will be mostly fine with a chance of a few showers but a gusty, chilly south-wester will make it clear autumn has arrived.

Similar conditions are possible throughout the weekend.

MetService spokesman Bob McDavitt said today's blustery cool easterly wind should die down this afternoon, making for warmer temperatures at the flower show later today and first thing tomorrow.  

WINNER ANNOUNCED:

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