Motueka Floral Art Circle and Friends present a Floral Theatre

August 25
Review by Val Armstrong

The Motueka Floral Art Circle and Friends presented a Floral Theatre to support Daffodil Day and the Cancer Society Fundraising appeal, on Tuesday afternoon and evening, August 24th, at Imagine Theatre.

Shirley Frater introduced her team for the afternoon's performance, which turned out to be an amazing display of theatre floral art, showcasing great talent and creativity.

Daffodil Day is for the Cancer Society, so using daffodils and yellow colours was the significance of the theme. It was a fast moving show with members from the Motueka Floral Art Group demonstrating their talent in the most amazing displays with flowers and other plants.

Poems were read by Shirley Lockhart at various times during the show, starting with William Wordsworth's "Ode to Daffodils". A very young singer dressed like spring sang "Raindrops on Roses" and the audience hung on every word of such a tuneful performance.

The first demo was small arrangements with hand-held flowers and using small containers which were then raffled at the end of the show for prizes. Then came a demo using a huge branch hung very cleverly from the roof with arranged test tubes hanging and the artist used daffodils for each test tube.

The guest artist Roseanne Armstrong from Richmond who has a diploma in Floral Artist Demonstrating. She showed several wonderful designs ranging from funky to modern, using very natural props like a couple of old rusty woks combined with driftwood, around which she then arranged flowers to depict fire, and likened it to an old thermet, which delighted the crowd with memories. She also amused with entertaining stories of her life, especially her school years.

Roseanne's final display was "The Circle of Life" with the theme "Memories". She used magnolia branches as her base, representing strength; then various greenery for softening - borage, which means courage, roses for love; and finally she lit a candle at the top. Memories were certainly the order of the day as most people have at some stage had someone they've known who has battled or died to cancer.

Her futureristic design was an amazing piece of dried and woven Nikau Palm, like a sculpture inspired by nature. She then arranged flowers and greenery through it.

Another design on display used dried seaweed shaped by nature into an amazing form, and the artist went to work on it with her talent using fauna that no one else could ever have thought of.

The Imagine Theatre was filled with enthusiastic people, and everyone was enthralled and by the talent and creativity of local artists who were at times shy about showing their designs.

The Cancer Society representative Jan Riley then thanked the Motueka Floral Art Society both back and front stage for their hard work and presentation and the crowd who attended for their support. They raised over a $1000 from the afternoon performance, and they go through it all again this evening, undoing all their work and reassembling it for the next audience.

Here are some photos I took at the event. If anyone else has their own ones to add, please email them in to

(Later: I'm told that the two shows raised an impressive $2010 for Daffodil Day. Well done!)

Further photos contributed by Shirley Frater:

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