Dutch native designed Robertson’s display at this year’s Flower Show

Posted 3/9/17

Emmanuella Williamson builds Robertson’s Flower Show exhibit. The Flower show opens this weekend. (Photo courtesy of Robertson’s Flowers)[/caption] by Diane Fiske When your chief floral designer …

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Dutch native designed Robertson’s display at this year’s Flower Show

Posted

Emmanuella Williamson builds Robertson’s Flower Show exhibit. The Flower show opens this weekend. (Photo courtesy of Robertson’s Flowers)[/caption]

by Diane Fiske

When your chief floral designer is Dutch, it seems logical that she would be the person to talk to about the Robertson Flowers’ exhibit at the Philadelphia Flower Show where the theme is Holland.

(It’s worth noting that the nation’s official name is Kingdom of the Netherlands. Holland really refers to two provinces in the nation, though the name has often been used to describe the entire country.)

Philip Ferry, president of Robertson’s Flowers asked Emanuella Williamson, a Dutch floral designer, to explain the architecture behind the company’s Flower Show exhibit during a visit to his company’s Wyndmoor workshop. The Flower Show opens this Saturday.

“Emanuella is from Holland and has worked with us since 2001,” Ferry said. “She is the best person to explain the exhibit she designed for the Flower Show, which is about Holland this year.”

The tall red-haired Williamson had come to Robertson’s as an exchange student, met her husband, went home and came back to be married after she received her degree in Floral Science in Holland.

As she explains it, putting the Robertson’s display together is an architectural process and not the art of arranging a few flowers in some pretty vases.

“We have about the biggest site at the Flower Show,” she laughed,” and it is our job to bring Holland to the visitors to the show.”

The Robertson’s site is 1,148 square feet. It was Williamson’s job to design the elements that would make visitors feel they had been in her country.

The Netherlands, she explains, is a small country and below sea level. One of the first steps of Williamson’s depiction was to produce a bridge covered with chicken wire and adorned with flowers.

Bridges over canals are a typical part of the landscape. The Canals run perpendicular to the three rivers crossing Holland and help remove much of the water from the land.

The Flower Show bridge will be bordered with a metallic handrail adorned with flowers. Under the rail, a “pool” made up of a liner filled with water will help create the canals of Holland.

These dutch canals are aided in their rescue efforts by the ubiquitous windmills that are seen all over the country, not as scenic attractions, but as a necessary component of keeping the country viable and dry.

Williamson said these canals were first formulated by the Dutch in the middle ages and they helped establish the Netherlands as a European power. Barges brought spices, chocolate, coffee and other commodities to Holland and then to Europe through this canal system.

“Another thing we try to show in our exhibit is the system of trees marking distance,” Williamson said.

In her design there will be simulations of a type of willow tree, common in Holland, called Salix Alba, which is placed along the canals at specific distances apart so barge operators can know where they are.

“The land is flat. There are no hills or other spots along the canal, “she said, “this is how the barge operators can mark distance.

“In Holland, the tops of the trees are cut off every so often so they will retain their height, “she said.

At the Flower Show, the tops were brought from the Netherlands and placed on the simulated wooden models she designed to represent the Salix Alba, which does not grow here.

Flowers in Robertson’s Flower Show display will be imported from Holland and will be changed every day.

The typical Dutch scenes Williamson created include a rider on a bicycle, the preferred method of travel in the Netherlands, a party scene, a restaurant and a yard sale featuring Dutch ice skates and wooden shoes. Of course, all these will be festooned with tulips.

Tulips are more than a spring flower in Holland, where the Dutch India Company imported them, and their popularity led to Tulipmania in 1630.

“The flower was a form of money to the Dutch until the market crashed,” she said. “Nevertheless, tulips are still very important to the Dutch and are an important export for us.”

Williamson said she is proud of her country and proud that it is featured at the flower show along with a visual feast for tulip lovers and an opportunity to learn a little about her country’s history.

Diane Fiske is an architecture and planning writer who has written for the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News. Her Streetscape column on architectural and planning issues appears periodically in the Local.

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