A Crush of Colours

"If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging."
Alan Bennett

Each year, Chiang Mai celebrates Thailand's botanical bounty with a flower festival. Always held in February, when flowers seem to be blooming everywhere you look, the festival has been pared down slightly this year because of the pandemic. Typically the event spans seven days and is highlighted by a parade of floats, made up entirely of flowers, through the streets. This year, although the festival lasts only three days and the floats remain parked in one spot, the beauty of the flowers, the vibrant colours and the skill and creativity involved in creating the floats are undiminished.

Like fine art, when admired from a distance, the floats are vibrantly colorful and typically represent various aspects of Thai culture. But when you look more closely, you realize that the mosaics are made up of individual blooms, that the dragon's scales are made of thinly sliced dried citrus, that the dove's body is covered in sesame seeds and its wing feathers are pumpkin seeds. There must be hundreds of man hours of labour needed to assemble each of these floats.

The festival also features a potted plant competition that includes bonsai, orchids and other plants that seem to be growing in thin air.

I'm limited to posting only six photos here, but I have added all the pictures I took during our visit to my Facebook page.Read more