A kind of huge, horticultural dream, Floriade comes around once in a blue moon in Holland and offers delights for experts and amateurs alike in horticulture, growing, plants and more. Here our deputy editor Sorrel Everton breaks down the wonders of Floriade and what to expect.
What is Floriade?
Floriade is a vast international horticultural expo held every ten years in the Netherlands. For 2022’s Floriade the theme is Growing Green Cities with all the exhibits focusing on the latest green innovations to make city more liveable and sustainable.
There are 33 international pavilions to explore with each country showcasing their culture, plants, flowers and latest green technologies that look to solve some of the biggest questions we face today of ensuring future greenery, food production, health and energy. From state-of-the-art solar roof tiles to amazing green wall gardens and from the best ways to grow tomatoes to the latest pruning techniques, Floriade allows you to discover it all first hand.
Beside all the inspiring gadgets and innovations, you can take a stroll through many flowering gardens, an inspiring arboretum and enjoy a varied art and culture programme.
Where is Floriade?
The site cover 153 acres in Almere, on the outskirts of Amsterdam in The Netherlands. The show is open for 6 months (until October) giving the displays and gardens the chance to really settle, grow and evolve through the seasons. Once Floriade ends in October, the site is planned to be redeveloped into a suburban neighbourhood focussed on green living.
Floriade Expo 2022
Archerpad 8
1324 ZZ Almere
The Netherlands
When is Floriade 2022?
This year's Floriade runs 14 April to 9 October 2022.
How to get to Floriade
Floriade is located in Almere in the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area, next to the A6 motorway. The Expo is 30 km from Amsterdam and 45 km from Schiphol International and is easy to reach by public transport. Take a train to Almere’s city centre, from there you can take a bus, shuttle bus, or take a 10-minute walk from the railway station and hop on a tour boat to take you to the show. You can also cycle or drive.
What to see at 2022 Floriade
Dutch planting expert Jacqueline van der Kloet has been involved in the plantings of public areas around the show. She’s on site regularly and so has had plenty of time to see all that the international show has to offer. Here’s her pick of highlights
JvdK: Biodiversity, re-using materials, sustainable materials, insects, sustainability in all aspects are big items at this Floriade and you will find them back in all kinds of entries.
They are, in random sequence:
• The pavillion and garden of Amsterdam and Almere: ‘The voice of urban nature’ : about biodiversity, sustainability and the use of more wild and edible plants in lovely and spectacular combinations.
• Plot number 16 at ‘Green Island’, where a group of Dutch contractors,The Green Collextive, put forward all kind of solutions to keep the garden as green and healthy as possible with emphasis on, again, biodiversity.
• ‘The Wild Wealth’ in the Utopia area where a group of contractors who are using recycled materials represent themselves in a stunning entry. Their display is a combination of used tiles, trunks, bottles, concrete objects and a lovely wild planting.
• Classics & Future Moments in the plots 113, 114, 115, 116, on a slope overlooking the water. Here are 8 huge borders, 4 of them designed by designers who have been working as plant experts for years (I am one of them) and 4 designed by young talents in this same field. Very interesting to see how different they are from each other.
• The ‘Wow’-zone: a 800 m stretch from east to west with a changing scheme of annual plants, lilies and dahlias.
• The building of Aeres Hogeschool – the new location of the university for applied sciences with on the east side a huge ‘green wall’.
• The Japanese entry : a stunning building with a Japanese garden around it and indoors very lovely exhibitions of Ikebana, changing regularly.
• The French pavilion, a modern, very light building with a beautiful perennial garden (Awkward to say it, but my design as well).
• The Qatar entry with traditional architecture next to 3-D printed buildings and quite a nice garden around it.
• And last but not least: many areas with plantings that will be public green areas in the future. As you might know, this whole Floriade-area will be a residential area in the future. There are 192 plots, most of them 32 x 50 meters and they all have a 4 m wide frame that will be public green in the future.
In the inner part of each plot houses will be built. The building starts in December, so the future inhabitants will live in houses that already are framed in by public green. This public green follows the rules of an Arboretum: each plot is dedicated to a certain letter of the alphabet; so it starts with 32 areas with the letter A; Acer, Amorpha, Aconitum, Alchemilla, Allium. Then after that the B: Betula, Brunnera, Buphthalmum, Bellevalia and so on, till all 26 letters of the alphabet have been used in the 192 plots.
My task was to make plant schemes for all these areas, in a very different way from how you normally work when you make a plant scheme because I was restricted to using only plants with a specific letter in a certain area. Not all of them, but definitely a large number of these areas turned out very well so they are number 10 on my list.