The 21st World Orchid Conference in Joburg

Spring has sprung at Valley Lodge!

It is spring in South Africa! And even though I only just got back from Cape Town and our EPIC ROAD TRIP and I haven't even finished all the laundry and unpacking and have barely gone through the thousands of photographs we took (we are out of control on that score), I still managed to dash out to check out the 21st World Orchid Conference and Show at the Sandton Conference Centre. I had to. Flower Shows are a rite of spring.

For many years, spring for me meant a visit to the Philadelphia Flower Show presented each March by the Pennsylvania Horticulture Society. The show heralded the dawn of spring in the northeastern United States just as definitively as the "spring ahead" theft of the hour's sleep we endured to end daylight savings time or the sartorial switch from heavy coats and boots to a new spring wardrobe.

The World Orchid Conference and Show is a two-pronged event. It is a four day conference with 60 speakers, both national and international, presenting lectures ranging from beginners through to the scientific level. And it is a five day flower show featuring more than 40 exhibits from many different countries, orchid societies and commercial growers across the world. Apart from the orchid show, there was a Cyclad display, the first indoor and live wetland display, featuring orchids of course, a National Floral Art competition, a Botanical Art competition and an Orchid photography competition. Wow!

Ecuador exhibit

Upstairs was the 21st World Orchid Conference. It is only the first time that the World Orchid Conference is being held in Johannesburg and only the second time in its history that it has been held in South Africa. As a matter of fact, the only African country to host the World Orchid Conference is South Africa even though there are at least two other African countries with Orchid Societies, Kenya and Zimbabwe. The first conference held in South Africa was the 10th World Orchid Conference held in Durban in 1981. The first ever World Orchid Conference was held in the good ol' US of A in St. Louis, MO in 1954!

The conference lay-out and agenda was very similar in scope to the Philadelphia Flower Show or the Chelsea Flower Show in London, albeit limited to one single family of flora. But what variety there is in the Orchidaceae genera clan!

And of course, there was shopping! I resisted the urge to invest in the slaughter of any more innocent orchids.Orchids are an annual in my hands and a very expensive one at that.

But I did buy a beautiful commemorative silk scarf. A staple at many large flower shows and exhibitions, the show scarf's design usually commemorates the host location or club and is always a limited edition. I have a commemorative scarf from each and every Garden Club of America (GCA) Annual Meeting Flower Show I attended from Denver to our own Garden State show in NJ.











Downstairs was the associated Flower Show. It was quite similar to the countless flower shows I have attended, judged and exhibited in over the years.

That's me in the front!

I even co-chaired a small flower show for my own garden club once. The very first ever GCA small flower show the club presented in its almost century history.









I was very happy to see there was a photography component as part of the World Orchid Conference flower show. When I first joined my GCA Garden Club in 2001, photography was in its infancy as a discipline for competition and judging in the GCA. It started out as a sub-committee of flower arranging but soon became its own discipline alongside horticulture, flower arrangement, conservation and other related areas such as garden history & design.

First Place @ the GCA Annual Meeting

On a whim, I entered the very first ever GCA Annual Meeting Photography competition in Kansas City in 2005. The show featured over 500 exhibits and I won my first blue ribbon for photography - only two blue ribbons were awarded! It was a close-up photograph of a peapod which I had taken the previous year as part of a garden photography workshop at the New York Botanical Gardens. I won a blue ribbon in the GCA Zone IV Photography Show the following year in Princeton and that started me on a path to more competition and exhibition and eventually to judging competitions myself.

I became the first Photography Judge in my local garden club, one of only a handful in my GCA Zone, competed in countless shows, attended dozens of workshops and judged in many, many shows all over the country and even served as the Photography Chairman when my own GCA Zone presented its photography show when it was our turn to produce a GCA Annual Meeting and Flower Show in 2010.

All this flower photography reminds me I have to get back to culling through those countless Namaqua flower photographs we took on our recent trip. Gotta go!