 The Milne House Garden Club presented a spectacular
two-day floral event in May at the newly renovated facilities of the
Toronto Botanical Garden in Toronto with Andreas Verheijen, a
well-known international floral designer.
The event started with a two-hour design show, where Verheijen demonstrated various techniques and design styles on stage. One of my favourite was a round branch armature made out of willow branches, on a very large scale, which took up a third of the stage. He then was stringing large white  Dendrobium blooms on very thin wire and circled them around the structure in between the branches. A very effective arrangement with only materials (willow branches, wire, and white Dendrobium Orchids) A Branch Candelabra was another fabulous design, which had numerous glass vials attached to the structure. Casey Greenhouses supplied and sponsored different varieties of large anthuriums, which became the center attraction for an exotic design, which Verheijen completed in a premade Sisal container, which then was lit from the bottom for visual effects. The final design of the presentation was a very large tree-structure made out of crab apple branches and then wired with glass vials. These vials were then filled with multicoloured florals such as anthuriums, gerberas, fritularia, callas and hydrangea.
The only greenery that was added was the lily grass, which added a lot of movement to the design.
The theme in both workshops was all about special techniques in manipulating, twisting and bending beargrass, which were held the following day. The morning workshop started off with a bunch of Beargrass for each student, which was then bundled and wired in sections. The whole concept then evolved into a tree like sculpture, which was reminiscent of an African tree with a large crown.
Participants were then shown how to complete the arrangement using a square glass container as a base and adding just a few flowers. The second workshop consisted of a typical European hand-tied bouquet with tulips, roses and gerberas, which were then framed with a collar of beargrass woven and braided into a very exciting decorative armature.
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