The flowers that bloom in the Spring - tra la,
Breathe promise of merry sunshine.
As we merrily dance and we sing - tra la,
We welcome the hope that they bring - tra la,
Of a summer of roses and wine.
- Nanki-Poo trilling the joys of spring in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado.
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Rapture! Rapture! As I begin writing this column, I see from the Final Trumpdown app on my smartphone that the time remaining of the obscene Trump presidency has dwindled down to 857 days, 20 hours, 10 minutes and a few fleeting seconds. More of this optimism-stoking countdown in a moment.
But first: Floriade, immodestly (almost Trumpianly) describing itself as "Australia's Biggest Celebration of Spring" is underway again in Canberra's Commonwealth Park and I am much enjoying (tra-la) my annual treat of not going to it.
And yet the pleasure the boycotting of it gives me (my boycott is in the spirit of Billy Collins' poem Consolation that begins "How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer") is tinged with regret. Floriade's themes are always so yawn-makingly bland and banal when, really, a gigantic festival of flowers could be made irresistibly exciting and edgy.
I have some ideas of my own but first point to last month's 24th annual Flower Carpet event in Brussels. There, 750,000 dahlia flowers were employed to decorate the city's Grand Square with a gigantic reproduction-celebration of Katsushika Hokusai's world-famous painting The Great Wave. Go online now to look and to gasp at it!
And so I prod Floriade's movers and shakers with the Big Idea that they might do something similar, perhaps florally reproducing, on a gigantic scale, famous Australian paintings.
John Brack's beloved 1969 oil painting Barry Humphries in the character of Mrs Edna Everage leaps to mind because it is so florally colourful.
In the portrait, Brack has captured Barry's Edna's notoriously hideous dress sense by putting her in a coat of shocking petunia pink above a dress of howling chrysanthemum lime green. Reproduced on a grand scale in Commonwealth Park, Edna's coat might use 10,000 massed 'Hot Pink' variety petunias and 3000 massed 'Kermit' variety chrysanthemums. Better still, I imagine hitherto bland and chocolate boxy Floriade becoming an edgy, provocative, controversial, political Floriade.
And a political Floriade could devote its beds to cartoonishly irreverent floral portraits of political figures.
In my mind's eye I see Floriade's floral Trump, his famously fake-tanned tangerine face made from 10,000 'Dwarf Orange' variety marigolds. The contrasting white circles around his eyes (caused by the goggles he wears when he's in his tanning bed) made from massed bright white 'Frost' variety pansies.
It would be malicious, but fun, for a satirically minded Floriade to create a floral portrait of Gina Rinehart because we know from experience (remember how she got into a litigious frenzy over the National Gallery's display of Vincent Namatjira's cartoon portrait of her) how much it would upset her. Arrogant trillionaires are fair game. Wittily, her portrait could be made from thousands of tall poppies.
And Ms Rinehart's puppets, One Nation leaders Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce, cry out for floral caricature given Pauline's famous head of flamingly ginger hair and Barnaby's famously crimson complexion (one unkind cartoonist insists on portraying him as a beetroot).
I see Pauline's hair captured by a host of the 'Orange Emperor' tulip variety and Barnaby's rubicund cheeks depicted with a host of the 'Roman Empire' tulip, boasting what its creators call "fire-engine red petals".
And a political, provocative Floriade could address the AUKUS debacle.
I see an enormous bed depicting an actual-size made-of-flowers Virginia-class nuclear submarine. I see, of course, a yellow submarine (the hyacinth cultivar 'Yellow Queen' will be ideal) 115 metres long and so requiring up to 750,000 Yellow Queens.
With it I see the shocking legend "The AUKUS program is expected to cost Australian taxpayers up to $368 billion by the mid-2050s" starkly picked out (like a newspaper's startlingly dramatic front page headline) in jet-black pansies against a bed of dazzlingly white pansies.
And speaking of Trump, I remind readers that this psychotherapeutic column has an occasional theme of suggestions of ways we can try, for our sanity's sake, to endure what's left of these sanity-sapping Trump years.
Whooping with delight (tra-la) I pass on to you my discovery that there are free apps (with witty names like The Final Trumpdown) one can add to one's smartphone that enable one to see exactly how many dwindling days and hours and seconds of the Trump tyranny are left. These sorts of apps (there are several of them, surely sent by God, freely available on the internet) are counting down to midday Washington DC time on January 20, 2029 when Trump's successor will be inaugurated and the evil spell of Trumpdom will be broken.
What a tonic it is, when Trump-induced despair is gnawing at one's sanity, to turn to the app with its living, ticking reminder that there is light at the end of the terrible Trumpian tunnel, that time's winged chariot is promising us delivery from this evil.
As I complete crafting this column, I am consulting the wonderapp on my phone. Rapture! Now that January 20, 2029 delivery from evil is even closer. Take heart, Australia!
