Thursday 28 July 2016

Of Leaves & Flowers

 
The Garden Festival is around the corner and Baby's school will be showcasing its talents at Garden By The Bay some time this week.

I was in the school helping out with the preparations for the event. The jobscope included doing the ground work for the event by helping to cut flower stems and wrap flowers according to the requirements. It sounded simple enough.
 
I took Baby to school so that she could sleep in for another hour and after that, I waited till 8am before reporting at the venue as required.

I underestimated the requirement for the preparations. It was rather labour-intensive. The scissors I brought from home broke after cutting a few thick woody stems and one of the parent-volunteers in-charge lent me a cutter meant for cutting flower stems.

About twenty parent-volunteers turned up for the occasion.  From the receiving of flowers in huge boxes, to the unboxing, filling Toyogo boxes with water, cutting of stems, immersing flower stems in water and pulling out flowers to remove excessive leaves, everything was pure human labour. Behind the glamour of the event, there is an incredible amount of manual work to be done, by so many pairs of hands too!

The preparations make us realise that we don't just pay for the flowers and ribbons at the florist, but also the florist's ground work and creativity.

Look at the amount of leaves
 
and flowers!
 
 
 
 
 
When the flowers and leaves arrived at about 8.45am, we set to work cutting the stems and immersing the stems in water. By 10.30am, all were about done and we had to wait for two hours for the flowers to be 'conditioned', meaning the flowers would have, hopefully, absorbed enough water to preserve them till the end of the week. 

We sat around and waited for a while before breaking off for lunch, after which we returned to the room to wrap the flowers. However, there seemed to be too many pairs of hands in the room and I felt rather redundant there. By 1.30pm, I was quite tired and was relieved to leave the school with Baby. 

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