Rooted in Paradise: A Garden Club of America Major Flower Show

Held every three years, The Garden Club of Honolulu’s wildly popular Major Flower Show returns to the museum in May as Rooted in Paradise. The competitive event, chaired by museum trustee Priscilla Growney, is one of only three Garden Club of America major flower shows held across the country in 2018—the other two will take place in Greenwich, Conn., and Memphis, Tenn.

This year the show’s Floral Traditions exhibit focuses on the club’s long ties with the Honolulu Museum of Art by honoring May Moir, one of Hawai‘i’s most revered floral designers and gardeners. She was part of the museum’s famed floral program for almost 50 years, and headed it from 1963 to 1998, creating fresh, innovative tropical arrangements that welcomed visitors.

HoMA emeritus trustee Alice Guild was a student of Moir and for the flower show she has guided a group of Garden Club members that will interpret a selection of Moir’s classic arrangements based on images from Guild’s photo archive and Moir’s notebooks. All members of the group have been part of the museum’s floral team. In preparation, they conducted basement archeology at the museum, digging up original pots from the 1960s that Moir used.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website