floriade

Every Spring in Canberra there’s a flower festival called Floriade. It lasts about a month and they plant the flowers so that they bloom in timed intervals. This year’s theme is Rock’n’Roll and they seem to have mostly represented that as a colour theme based on song titles: Mellow Yellow, I See Red, A Whiter Shade of Pale, Strawberry Fields Forever, Paint It Black, Brown, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Fields of Gold, Blue Suede Shoes, etc. Each section also comes with trivia facts – did you know, for example, that The Rolling Stones’ manager locked Mick and Keith up until they came up with original songs. Festival events include bands and such, and a charity fund-raiser called Gnomestock, where thousands of garden gnomes have been painted by members of the public to look like their favourite rockers.

The flowers you see at the beginning of Floriade are different to the ones that are blooming by the last week. I'm always kind of amazed at how fascinating flowers can be. I mean they're just flowers. Sure, there's lots of them, but it's not that. I think I stop and look more closely at individual flowers. I forget how beautiful or interesting something so simple can be.

I took some photos with both my film camera and my digital camera. I won’t have the film developed till Wednesday but here’s a preview of one of my digital pics. I’m eager to see how Phi’s stuff came out as he has a way better camera than mine and can take very close shots that would blur if I took them with my film camera.