It’s Floriade Time!

Chris Beytes

Floriade 2022 has kicked off in Almere, the Netherlands, near Amsterdam. GrowerTalks paid a visit to the once-every-10-years Dutch horticulture exposition in mid-June while we were in the country for the GreenTech horticultural technology show, as well as the Dutch Flower Trials.

Pictured: Mariam Almheiri, Minister of Climate Change and Environment for the United Arab Emirates, and her entourage tour the greenhouse with (left) Maurice Wubben, a greenhouse manager at Floriade, and (right) Yöel Schuller, deputy CEO of Floriade.

Floriade, which remains open for six months, is intended to give the public an appreciation for plants and their power to improve our lives. This seventh edition of Floriade (the first was held in 1960) focused on “Growing Green Cities”—an emphasis on the value that horticulture provides to communities, from food production to energy savings—as well as beautification. The 150-acre site (which will become a beautiful residential community after the event closes) featured displays by dozens of countries.

Our favorite was the impressive 1-hectare (about 100,000-sq. ft.) greenhouse filled with displays of our products—blooming and foliage plants, vegetables in production and more. Quite a few of your suppliers got to show off their products to the end consumer. And to politically powerful people, too, such as her excellency Mariam Almheiri, Minister of Climate Change and Environment for the United Arab Emirates (which has a display at Floriade). She and her entourage were on a tour of the greenhouse when we happened by.