Saturday 21 & Sunday 22 May 2016, 1-5pm
Dalston Eastern Curve Garden will be visited by ‘Floriography: The Bureau of the Unsaid’ on 21 & 22 May, launching four weeks of ‘Dalston Flower Show’ events and activities at the Garden for Chelsea Fringe 2016.
‘Floriography’, the language of flowers, has been around for over a thousand years and was especially popular with the Victorians. Gifts of blooms, plants and specific floral arrangements were used to deliver a coded message to the recipient, allowing the sender to express feelings, which could not be spoken aloud in Victorian society. ‘The Bureau of the Unsaid’ will revive and update this cryptic and intriguing means of communication to help visitors express themselves with friends and family.
A pop-up florist’s office, filled with flowers entirely constructed from paper will be installed for the duration of the Chelsea Fringe. On the weekend of 21 & 22 May Artist Emily Tracy, assisted by a team from the Garden, will be hosting this messaging service and inviting all to express their secret or vital feelings. The team will help visitors to pick out and construct their own coded bouquet made from fabulous and fantastic paper blooms complete with typewritten translation for the uninitiated. If you need to say ‘Yes’ then a solid coloured carnation would do the trick, for ‘No’ that would be a striped Carnation, to say ‘Sorry’ that’s a purple Hyacinth, a purple Lilac is ‘I think I am falling in love’, and ‘I am dangerous’ is a sprig of Rhododendron, for ‘Can you get some milk on the way home’ a bunch of White Roses will say it for you. Events for Chelsea Fringe at the Garden continue until 12 June.
