DRAGONS IN BLOOM

The flower carpet takes centre stage at the Mid-Autumn Festival celebrations at the Supertree Grove in Gardens by the Bay. The Straits Times goes behind the scenes to look at how the display was painstakingly created by hand by horticulturists, workers and volunteers.

- Lim Yaohui

It took a mind-blowing 75,000 pots of plants to make a flower carpet that is almost the length of a Boeing 737-900 plane, or two tennis courts placed end to end.

Singapore's largest flower carpet to date spans 44m in diameter.

About 12 times bigger than the creation in 2023, the flower carpet display returns to the Supertree Grove in Gardens by the Bay in September as part of its Mid-Autumn Festival celebrations.

More than 20 horticulturists, groups of workers and a dedicated team of over 250 volunteers toiled over 10 days to craft the flower carpet, which is open to the public free of charge from Sept 4 to 15.

In the centre are two replicas of the dragon head of the iconic dragon playground in Toa Payoh Lorong 6, which was designed by HDB architect Khor Ean Ghee in 1979.

The dragon heads, in this tribute to his work, are surrounded by a colourful display of Singapore's national flower, the Papilionanthe Miss Joaquim orchids.

The carpet is composed of a type of flowering plant called Cyathula prostrata, commonly known as pastureweed, and eight different cultivars of chrysanthemums of varying colours, from green and pink, to yellow and red.