Europa Cup 2011 – Fourth Assignment: Arrangements of Pot Plants

Saturday morning, September 3. It is 10:15 o’clock and after an exhausting first day the contestants have once again gotten up early, ready for the fourth round of Europa Cup assignments: the outdoor pot plant arrangements. In a span of just 45 minutes, the Republic Square in the city center of Czech host city Havirov has to be suitably decorated with an impressive plant arrangement, using just the materials that have been provided by the Europa Cup organizers.

The theme is ‘from coal to blooms’, and as the arrangements will be exhibited outdoors for at least two months and thus have to withstand any possible weather conditions, a lot of thought has to go into the designs. Any and all techniques are allowed on the part of the competitors, as far as the supplied materials will allow, but for aesthetic purposes the works may not exceed an area of 3 square meters.

Scoring the maximum possible points on technique, as well as very high on the dimensions of idea, color and composition, was soon-to-be Europa Cup winner Natalia Zhizhko from Russia. She achieved an excellent 88 points with her arrangement, which featured a set of leaf-decorated whitish stalks threaded into the shape of a globe, with a delicate selection of pot plants set in coal bedding in its middle. She explains her, sober but very stylish-looking, design in the following terms: “For me, the connection of coal and flowers only brings the association with mourning. I think it can be a beautiful mourning work using this material combined with bright flowers rather than somber ones. But for interiors I would not use coal as a material”.

Runner up in this round, with just three points less than Natalia (85), was UK candidate Neil Whittaker. He scored particularly high on idea, color use and employed technique, with his bouquet-shaped arrangement that almost seems as if it wants to draw the onlooker into its embrace. The selection of green plants he utilizes is impressive, providing for a very natural and fresh feel to the piece. The only other colors come from a select few well-put white flowers, and a tinge of blue from what seem to be patterned paper cards, which have been decked out so as to appear somewhat like the center of a bloom. “Coal brings power and light into the world so the flowers I would chose would be bright and strong with strong forms to grow from the base of coal”, Neil predicted his later work:

In third place, lastly, came Swedish candidate Joacim Lindgren, with a total of 82.2. He scored the highest of all candidates on the dimension of idea, while also doing very well in the fields of composition and color. His wide, basket-shaped arrangement featured a bit more color and vibrancy than the other prize-winning works, but perhaps also lacked a bit in technical design ‘purity’ because of it. Inspired, in his own words, by floral masters like Gregor Lersch, Johan Pettersson, Tomas Kallin, Stein-Are Hansen, Thor Gundersen and Daniel Ost, the Swede clearly knows exactly what he’s doing when it comes to floristry:

For all of the photos from this round, we point you to our photogallery: click here.

To return to the general Europa Cup 2011 page with the links to the coverage of the championship's other rounds, please click here.