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Port Eliot Festival: A flower show out of left field
Port Eliot's inaugural Flower Show, almost certainly a first for any British arts festival, promised not to conform to the usual etiquettes, nor to stick to the standard rules.
There were conventional elements (a marquee tent, trestle tables, satin rosettes, the WI) but this was a traditional flower show with a "distinctive contemporary twist".
"We threw out the NAFAS (National Association of Flower Arrangement Societies) manual," says festival director, Catherine, Lady St Germans, who co-curated the show with Michael Howells (the resident designer at Ballet Rambert, he has also produced sets for big names in film and fashion, including John Galliano).
"We're simply looking for creative imagination and a love of flowers." Over the course of the weekend (July 23-25), festival-goers were treated to displays of floral art featuring everything from roses, peonies and Port Eliot hydrangeas to iced cup cakes, tiny felt mice scurrying through a tangle of undergrowth meshed with lace, a smashed champagne flute and a pair of decaying fish.
There were sweet peas in tin cans, weeds in Wellington boots, daisies in thimbles, a cartoon frog in a miniature vegetable patch, a teeny tea set in a tin-plate doll's house.
Turner prize-winner Grayson Perry flounced around in what he called a "shouty frock", looking like a stray from the festival's child-friendly House of Fairy Tales.
Biba founder, Barbara Hulanicki and celebrity milliner Stephen Jones wafted in and out (they were running fashion workshops in a neighbouring tent).
And the stalwart women of St Germans' WI, who did all the admin, checked in about 150 entries from a variety of contestants, some of whom sported hats and hairdos as colourful as their flowers.
Others dropped in en route from the campsite to the cabaret tent or the festival's one-minute disco (on the hour, every hour). I think we can safely say there's never been a flower show like it.
According to Howells, it all started in a Port Eliot drawing room, during the planning stages of this year's arts festival - the seventh in the Grade I listed, Repton parkland of the Earl of St Germans' Cornish estate.
"I'd always wanted to do a flower show," Catherine says. "I love the grassy smells and the atmosphere, although I always think the 'floral art tent' sounds a bit deadly, a bit intimidating.
Our idea was to encourage people like me - people who would never normally enter a flower-arranging competition - to express themselves in a different way." The show was set in a walled garden between Port Eliot's 19th-century Orangery and Lady St Germans' cutting garden.
In designing the setting, Michael took his inspiration, from Mrs Miniver, a wartime propaganda film, set around a flower and vegetable show - the kind of community produce show that still pops up all over village England in the summer.
He wrapped tent poles in exuberant trellises of ivy, hydrangeas and iceberg lettuces - all fake, but beautifully coordinated with striped bunting and a Raj-style pavilion. There were high-rise pedestal arrangements in the Orangery, tea and cakes, a brass band and a flower-arrangers' "box scheme" for impromptu entrants.
The classes, as devised by the co-directors, presumably over a few glasses of wine, included "an arrangement in a thimble for a tea party of mice" (children only), "More Tea Bishop?" (an arrangement of roses for a summer tea party) and "Hoe, Hoe, Hoe!" (an arrangement of weeds).
To judge them, Michael and Catherine were joined by designer Kitty Arden and Lady Boyd (whose garden at nearby Ince Castle, is open under the National Gardens Scheme). "We weren't interested in perfect flower arrangements," Michael says.
"We were looking for inspiration, a little bit of magic."
There were many other things to entertain the flower-show audience. On the awards podium, which doubled as a stage, landscape designer Todd Longstaffe-Gowan talked about indoor gardening in Regency London; and Port Eliot-based Buttervilla Funky Leaves (which provides organic salads to Jamie Oliver's restaurant Fifteen Cornwall) did a foodie demonstration using musk mallow, hollyhocks and tree spinach among a selection of edible plants.
"I've never tasted anything like it in my life," confessed a member of the audience as he nibbled on a leaf from a Paraguay sugar plant which, we learned, is 300 times stronger than sugar - with no calories.
In a floral-hat-trimming workshop, milliner Stephen Jones deftly turned a "not particularly nice" jumble-sale beret into a thing of beauty, using a wire coat hanger, a bit of Snip'n Twist, a rough-cut strip of garden netting (for the veil) and real flowers, some of them borrowed, he said, from "her ladyship's drawing room".
"I was going to prepare one earlier," he told us, as he fiddled with stems and wire. "But I'm afraid I went to the drinks tent and had a glass of champagne instead."
His finished hat, dressed with a jaunty hydrangea-and-daisy ensemble, and modelled by a member of the audience, won a big round of applause. But the floral art, or whatever you want to call it, remained the star of the show.
"I was so excited when I saw people queuing up to get in," Catherine says. One of the first in the queue was Britpop singer and broadcaster Jarvis Cocker.
For highlights, look no further than the bookish "In the Library" category and a rendition of Patrick Süskind's novel, Perfume, featuring lavender, pomegranates and the aforementioned fish, which according to one of the WI women, had been nibbled at in the night and continued, throughout the weekend, to attract flies.
Dickens' Great Expectations was represented twice - notably by Devon-based bookaholic blogger, Dovegreyreader (also known as community nurse Lynne Hatwell), who was highly commended for her extravagantly lacy bouquet, pinned with ideas sent from some of her thousands of readers.
The winning rosette in the "How Green is my Valet" class (an arrangement for a footman's stag night), featured broken glass, a crushed beer can, an empty takeaway tray, a garter and a tipsy bottle of bubbly, all in an elegant array of mixed foliage.
Simon Prosser, publishing director at Hamish Hamilton, won a rosette in the "Bunch of Sweet Peas" class for his Tin Drum, an arrangement in a tin can.
In "Five Go Mad in Cornwall", Stephen Jones was commended for his arrangement of dahlias made from Oasis floral foam topped with a crumpled picture of Lord and Lady St Germans' dog.
Professional florist Martyn John, who whizzed down from London, won the "Mr McGregor's Vegetable Patch" class with a polished arrangement of peppers, vine tomatoes, basil, beetroot and dahlias.
But the coveted Best in Show went to Heidi Peasley - a flower-show virgin. Her Grass Menagerie, for the "In the Library" category, featured an untidy nest of greens, like a first-thing-in-the-morning hairdo, upon which a little coterie of grass-made animals (a rabbit, a giraffe, a unicorn) were sewn into a fountain of sorrel, rye, corn and "grass grass", some of which she plucked from a Port Eliot hedge while queuing to get into the festival.
"It's so ingenious," Michael enthused. "So amusing." Grayson Perry presented the prizes.
As I was leaving the festival I ran into Heidi Peasley, trudging across a damp field, a rolled-up tent slung over one shoulder, a sleeping bag under one arm, carrying the dishevelled remnants of her award-winning Grass Menagerie. "I'm already thinking of ideas for next year," she told me.
Will there be a next year for the Port Eliot Flower Show? Oh, yes. "I think we've really started something here," enthused Lady St Germans.
She's already dreaming up the categories.
For more pictures from the festival and information on next year's events, see www.porteliotfestival.com.
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