Hong Kong Flower Market

By admin
Posted in World Gardens
On January 4, 2015
No Comments.

As a Canadian touring in Hong Kong in December, a side trip to the Hong Kong Flower Market was a perfect excursion arranged by our friends Nancy and John. Coming from Canada’s prairie region where temperatures were dropping to minus 28 Celsius at home that week, walking around the Hong Kong Flower Market and enjoying the abundance of flowers in the open flower shops was tonic for the spirits. The movement, colours, smells, and sounds of the market were absolutely delightful, and I loved the gorgeous displays put on by the smaller vendors as well as those of the larger retail and wholesale stores in the Flower Market district.

The Flower Market along Flower Market Road in Mong Kok, Kowloon, expanded sufficiently to attract the wholesale flower market business in the 1970s, serving as a distribution centre for the many flower shops, wedding and event planners, restaurants, and businesses that draw heavily on local flower distribution centres. The Flower Market by the 1990s had become a destination in its own right, drawing visitors to see the smaller shop fronts intermingled with several larger, higher-end stores, selling a diverse range of plants and products. During our walk through the market, we saw a multitude of exotic blooms through to common flowers most of us recognize on sight, along with display pots, fertilizers, smaller gardening tools, and seeds, mainly for the indoor and patio garden market.

The majority of people in Hong Kong do not have outdoor gardens, living primarily in condominiums and apartments. Smaller flower arrangements and potted plants will find their way to kitchen window sills, balconies overlooking parks and streets, and dining room tables. Larger potted plants, small fruit trees, climbing vines and shrubberies may be destined for the many gorgeous and well kept gardens encircling the grounds of apartments, businesses, store fronts, and interior and exterior garden display areas, or lining driveways and weaving along iron railings and fences skirting the public walkways. They will, in every case, bring some beauty into someone’s life in Hong Kong; and the Flower Market, that day and the next, will again do a booming business in distributing its products.

On the day of our visit, an ordinary weekday in early winter in Hong Kong, the sidewalks were crowded with people, with only a few people like myself carrying cameras and standing out like tourists tend to do. Folks were mainly going about their daily lives, buying fresh cut blooms, lovely arrangements, picking up “lucky houseplants” and potted plants for their balconies, or bouquets for special occasions. I would suppose that the wholesale buyers visit the Flower Market in the earlier part of the day, as it was afternoon when I visited, but likely there were some wholesale buyers mixed in among us as well, filling their purchase lists and looking over plant stocks.

The sidewalks in the market district and in other older Hong Kong speciality market districts are somewhat narrow, but still sufficient to handle the foot traffic. The flower market district runs along Flower Market Road, and also spills over into surrounding side streets, such as Sai Yee, shown in one of my photographs, and Prince Edward. We were able to move at our own pace along the walkway, tucking into the small shops, pausing to exclaim over the gorgeous arrangements, “stopping to smell the (Gerber) daisies,” so to speak, and generally drinking in the beautiful sights and smells around us.

My friend Nancy mentioned that the Chinese New Year, celebrated as the lunar cycle begins anew, is when things are at their liveliest throughout Hong Kong. Similar to other parts of the city, crowds pick up in the Flower Market during this time. To welcome in the new year, people come to the market to carefully pick out their favourite flowers, lucky bamboo, Bonsai trees and other plants with special meaning selected as a way to bless their families and households and invite good fortune into the lives of their loved ones.

You can find information on the Hong Kong Flower Market on sites like these:
flower-market.hk
www.discoverhongkong.com

Photo Gallery
Click on any photograph to enlarge, and click again on the photograph to advance through the series.