Floriade Canberra 2011

Floriade is Canberra's premium tourist event - it's a spring carnival with lots of flowers (mainly tulips) planted in various patterns in Commonwealth Park. It is very pretty and a lovely celebration of spring, if the sun decides to come out.

The flowers are planted in patterns, in line with the annual theme. For 2011, the theme is Food. For example:

This is supposed to be a 'spice market'. No matter how hard I try, it just looks like a whole lot of beautiful, colourful tulips. I'm sure that you'd have a much better effect with a birds eye view, but there isn't any way to see the flowers from above.... to some extent, I think this defeats the purpose.... but it's still a nice idea.

As another example, this one is supposed to evoke a 'celebration cake':

But anyway, I really enjoyed my afternoon spent at Floriade. The highlights were:
(1) The gorgeous flowers
(2) Free food and drink samples in the marketplace, where vendors were giving free tastes of their wares
(3) Garnier world, where I got a free 5 minute neck and shoulder massage and a free sample bag, complete with 4 full sized products!

Some more photos of the event:

Also to come- my adventures at Floriade Nightfest 2011 - the ticketed night time event. You can't say I'm not making the most of Canberra :-)