The Flower Shop

There are quite a few flower shops around this area of Jeonju, but they are not like the flower shops that I am familiar with. They seem to be a combination of flowers and pot plants, and mostly the latter.

Lotus Flower

I don't recall that I have every seen these in flower before. I remember seeing the pots in the water feature at the college - pots of soil with dead looking sticks just a couple of inches high. Over the past few weeks I have watched as the sticks began to sprout new leaves and soon there was a lush green growth from each pot. This week I discovered the flowers. Lotus Flowers I am told. They are beautiful flowers - perhaps with a fragrance (I do not know as the flowers are beyond reach in the pond). They photograph well.

Flowers

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I am (pleasantly) surprised to see how flowers are so popular here in China. There are many florist shops and they all seem to do a roaring trade. Certainly the corporate flower work is vry obvious, and occasionally I see other flower arrangements being carried around.

When a new business opens there is always a myriad of free standing bamboo framed flower arrangements. Apparently friends and business acquaintances purchase these and the more one receives the more success the business is likely to have. Gerberas are a popular flower in these.

When there is a special event there are amazing quantity of flowers - and this week when our college celebrated its upgrade to a university there were many many flowers. After the event the flowers were distributed to various offices, and I managed to score a rose and a stem of orchids that fell while being transported.

The photo above is of a display in the Hyatt in Shanghai when we visited a couple of weeks ago.

The Rose Garden

Hard to see - but little "cuttings" of rose bushes.

Roses in bloom - two photos.

When we arrived here in February, at the end of winter, there was a garden bed near the foreign teachers apartment building that nothing but the soil (tragically bland almost rocky soil) with rows of "sticks" approximately 3 inches high.

For many days I passed this "garden" with little interest, but one day I had a closer look and realized that the little sticks were small rose plants. (I learned later that they had been planted a year or so before and already had had one flowering, and were pruned back severely.)

As spring approached the familiar reddish shoots appeared and over the next month or so the "little sticks" grew until they were about three feet tall with copious buds on them. Right now the roses are blooming - still many buds, and some spent flowers. They are a picture.

(The soil in which the amazing gardens grow here is rocky, and full of clay which clumps. It is surprising to me that they don't compost - and there are many resources here to create compost - to add to the soil to nourish it.)

The Wedding Processions

The bride and groom's car.

The lead car with the brass band and drummer - second car with photographer

Apparently this is a custom that is known in this area, but not others. Certainly in other cities in this province, the wedding procedures are different. I find this quite amusing - quaint even. Generally this happens on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday as most of the weddings occur on these days.

A small truck or utility with about six musicians in red outfits with hats squeezed onto the back appears first of all, with the banging of the drums and the sound of trumpets. Behind this vehicle is a black car with someone holding a camera standing up with half his/her body out of the car. He/she is filming the procession for posterity.

The next car - adorned with flowers many of them stuck onto the car with sticky tape, appears and the bride and groom are sitting in the back. (I've even seen a smiling bride sitting next to the groom who was busily chatting on his mobile phone!) Then the families follow in several cars, often these are decorated with flowers or red and gold paper, and all the number plates are covered up with red and gold paper too. On Saturday there must have been many weddings as I was sitting in a pizza place in the city and it seemed nearly every five minutes another one of these processions passed by.

The Gerberas on the tricycle

As I was on the bus approaching the city square at Shaoxing, a man peddled past on his tricycle. It had several flower arrangements that I could clearly see were Gerberas. I was in a packed bus, so couldn't take a photo, but as it turns out I met up with the spectacle in the square.

These sort of arrangements appear at the doorways of stores - especially new stores, or when there is a big sale on, or some other important occasion.

Someone was telling me that a young man opened a new shop and he had 40 of these sent to him by his friends and family. The more you have the better apparently.

The Gerberas were a little worse for wear - perhaps half an hour on the back of a bike through crowded streets did affect them, but I think the quality of the flower was not as good as we would have had in our flower arrangements back home.

I'm not sure what one would do with the cane contraptions later - perhaps returned to florist, or recycled in some other way. Everything is recycled here.