Our guest speaker was Mr. Evan McKenzie, from Box Hill College of TAFE. Evan had kindly offered to fill in for our original speaker, who was unavailable. Evan’s background was in accounting, but he had owned and operated a successful floristry business for 32 years, and was now teaching senior students at the college. He had also held the post of head of Interflora.
Evan created four fabulous displays for us, with great dexterity and creativity. First there was a simple fishbowl of tulips, arranged inside the bowl. He advised to leave the flowers out of water before arranging them, to increase the flexibility of their stems.
Next, he created a delicate arrangement of 30 metaline roses; with a background of ‘silver suede’ plant, arranged in a pot with Oasis flower foam, interspersed with asparagus fern, and decorated with pearl-headed pins and delicate tinsel.
His third display was a large and stunning arrangement, suitable for a church, wedding, or glamorous hotel foyer. Evan used bamboo sticks, leaves, gladioli and monsteria leaves in his arrangement, adding red carnations, asparagus fern, sedum, decorative red chillies and white lilies - it made a stunning display.
While constructing these masterpieces, Evan gave us information on the floristry training currently available, and provided useful hints for preserving the life of cut flowers by using a mixture of sugar, citric acid and bleach or a commercial flower preservative. Hollow stemmed flowers such as gerberas benefit from being scaled and plunged into cold water to remove the air bubbles that cause the heads to9 droop.
Evan’s final piece was a stunning informal arrangement of twisted willow, water grass, and monsteria leaves, hydrangeas, lemon geranium and tuberoses, which was won by a delighted club member.
