A huge baobab and Alice in Wonderland: the Flower Festival-2018 was opened in Kazan

(KZN.RU, June 19, Ksenia Shvetsova). The Flower Festival opened in Kazan. There are 20 compositions on the stage in front of the Puppet Theater “Ekiyat”. Each one is a unique work of landscape art. Ilsur Metshin, the Mayor of Kazan, visited the site together with the citizens. He examined the created compositions, spoke with the participants of the festival and helped the children to plant several flower bushes.

The Flower Festival is held in the capital of Tatarstan for the fourth time. It gathered 18 participants on the site, including representatives of landscape companies, plant nurseries, housing and communal services, and a construction complex.

One of the most interesting compositions of the festival is called “Life in pink”. It was arranged by the company “Imperatorsky Pitomnik”, which last year presented a huge bouquet so loved by the visitors. Alexander Bakhtin, the general director of the company, told the head of the city that the authors' idea is based on a combination of incongruous, a combination of retro style and modernity. So, the main element of the composition was the car “Volga”, which turned into a cozy place of rest, decorated with flowers. “We practically revived the “Volga”, said Ekaterina Shamsutdinova, the landscape designer. “The creation of the composition as a whole took about a thousand different flowers”. The whole composition is made in pink, all the plants decorating the site were selected in the same style.

The Mayor appreciated the composition and noted that after the completion of the Flower Festival its elements could become a good decoration for the city's embankment.

Igor Kulyazhev, the deputy head of the Executive Committee and the chairman of the Committee for External Improvement, noted that some of the festival's compositions loved by the citizens have remained since last year, for example, the composition “Reflection”.

One of the brightest and most unusual elements of the festival was a real railway carriage. It became part of the composition dedicated to the anniversary of Yudino. Sergey Mironov, the head of the Kirovsky and Moskovsky districts’ administration, said that the composition “Yudino-100” was being prepared for the festival for a long time. Ilsur Metshin, together with one of the young guests of the festival, gave a symbolic train whistle that meant the start of the long way for the carriage.

The flower carriage can be compared by the unusualness and scale only with the composition “My Kazan” presented by the “Uytny Dom”. “Every year we participate in this festival. This year we decided to create a more symbolic and large composition”, said Ramil Sharafullin, the deputy general director of the “Uytny Dom”. The creation of the composition took about two weeks.

The Mayor talked to the children who also contributed to the creation of an unusual site.

The alley, decorated with children's drawings on the theme of Lewis Carroll's fairy tale “Alice in Wonderland”, leads to the final element of the festival: a huge tree resembling a baobab.

The Mayor thanked all the participants of the festival, the landscaping enterprise and the heads of the districts that supported the event. “The number of participants is growing, the compositions have become much more interesting”, noted I. Metshin. “Over the past year, 500 thousand Kazan citizens and guests visited the festival. It became a favorite place for the citizens. This year we planted 7 million flowers. It’s pleasing that Kazan is associated with flowers”.

Eduard Vafin, the deputy chairman of the Committee for External Improvement, said that monetary prizes are provided this year. 1 million rubles for the first place, 750 thousand rubles for the second one, and 500 thousand rubles for the third one. The people choice award was also estimated at 1 million rubles.

During the whole summer, the social project “Cultural Environments in Flower Kazan” will be held at the festival site. There will be various master classes, poetry readings, meetings with poets and writers, live music concerts, and much more.

The opening of the festival included performances of music and dance bands, as well as a fashion show and performance by the participants of the “Zhiznelub”. The heads of regional administrations, Azat Abzalov, the head of the Department of Culture, and Rosa Zabbarova, the manager of the MUP “Trust “Gorvozelenhoz”, attended the event.