Since getting the expo seven years ago, the organizers have constructed flower displays from 30 countries and gardens from 22, all designed with the cooperation of nurseries from throughout Taiwan. The goal? To show the world Taiwan's technical and cultural prowess in horticulture, technology, and conservation,

"The Taipei Flora Expo will be at the highest level of the International Flora Expo's 50-year history!" promises general producer for the expo Ting Hsi-yung.

Not only will the Taipei Expo be technologically innovative, conservationist concepts have been incorporated in every corner of the show, from the three R's-reduce, reuse, recycle-to the three G's-green buildings, green energy, green transportation. The exhibition halls are the best yet, having been praised by Dr. Doeke Faber, chair of the International Association of Horticultural Producers, as "setting the standard for the next decade."

This expo will be spread across four themed areas, offering enough to satisfy any flower lover:

Some of the focal-point flowers of the expo: Pleione formosana; Schomburgkia thomsoniana; the Taiwan-developed calla lily "Burgundy Lady"; and Myosotis sylvatica, more commonly known as "forget-me-not."

On the eastern side of Zhongshan North Road Section 3, flowers from around the world will be on exhibition and in competition. The Expo Hall here will also be the site for the opening and closing ceremonies, along with several high-profile international performances.

Themed after flowers, butterflies, and green lifestyles, the Expo Hall has a roof as thin as a cicada's wing and which arches and curves like a cocoon. It is truly the most iconic building of the show, and its semi-open design was built to hold 1,200 visitors.

Another eye-catching part of this park is the Global Garden Area, which hosts garden displays from 22 countries, including a Dutch "green wall" with tulips; an Arabian garden from Oman, complete with palms, roses, and dates; and a Japanese Zen garden, made with a focus on imperial dahlias and zoysia.

The Four Park Areas of the Flora Expo

Adjacent to the Fine Arts Park Area on Zhong-shan North Road, the Yuan-shan Park Area has five exhibition halls, including the Expo Theater, the Pavilion of Culture, and Celebrity's House, all of which feature repurposed buildings from the Taipei Children's Recreation Center. The Expo Theater is home to a 3D movie theater, while the Pavilion of Culture will show off the best of Taiwan's traditional folk arts, and Celebrity's House will shine a spotlight on celebrities through both art and technology. The first such celebrity to be honored will be legendary songstress Teresa Teng.

The Expo Dome, in the middle of Zhong-shan Football Stadium, will be host to what is being called the "Olympics of Floriculture." Over the expo's 171 days, seven competitions, nine themed exhibitions, and one of the world's three biggest orchid shows-the Taiwan International Orchid Show-will be held here, with the latter bringing together almost a thousand different rare orchids.

The Pavilion of New Fashion is the world's first building made primarily of recycled PET bottles, and once the expo is finished, it can be disassembled like Lego and rebuilt for shows elsewhere.

Expo Hall in the Yuanshan Park Area combines Aboriginal textile colors, the lines of bamboo weaving, and symbols of nature like cocoons, butterflies, and flowers, representing Taiwan's natural and ethnic diversity.

This area is situated at the corner of Xinsheng North and Minzu East Roads, and hosts three halls-the Pavilion of Dreams, the Pavilion of Future, and the Pavilion of Life, all of which have been certified by the Ministry of the Interior as "diamond-class" green buildings.

The Pavilion of Future, containing 15 themed areas, is designed as a modern greenhouse, with flower exhibitions organized by season, latitude, and altitude, as well as areas devoted to cacti, ferns, and orchids. There is also an exhibition of rare species, provided by the Dr. Cecilia Koo Botanic Conservation Center, including Adiantum meishanianum, a fern of which only 20 are left in Taiwan.

The Pavilion of Dreams, meanwhile, uses cutting-edge sensors and interactive technology to create a "technological garden," offering visitors the astonishing sight of a giant mechanical flower blooming, while in circles of light people can "turn on" a growing tree....

Parts of this pavilion make use of innovative technologies developed in Taiwan, such as a massive, rollable, super-thin speaker system; a super-high-frequency RFID system made of miniscule, overlapping sensors; the biggest curved smart touchscreen LCD; a 65-inch, vertical 3D LCD viewable without glasses; and a system using ultrawide-bandwidth sensors for interaction based on physiological factors. All told, the Pavilion of Dreams is an imaginative merging of art and high technology.

The Xinsheng Park Area is also home to the Pavilion of Regimen, dedicated to promoting simple, healthy lifestyles. Here, 350 centegenarian trees and distinctively Oriental bonsais will be on display, along with the Palace of Flora Teas, which has been repurposed from the Lin Antai Historical House and boasts a Fujian-style garden with secluded bamboo paths and bonsai tea plants.

The Floral Tunnel serves as a link between the Xin-sheng, Fine Arts, and Dajia Riverside Park Areas, and is lined with bouquets, trees, and vines, giving a layered and highly visual feel to the pathway.

Top to bottom: Maidenhair fern; staghorn (photo by Hsueh Chi-kuang); telegraph grass, which seems to dance in response to light or sound; the fuzzball-like Espostoa cactus; and a 1500-year-old bonsai cypress.

Here there are no exhibition halls, but rather a park dedicated to the idea of "leisure and the water," exhibiting some of Taiwan's more distinctive plants and flowers. The 1.5-hectare Sea of Flowers Area creates a scenic area with great variation in content and height, giving life to the Chinese concept of a "painting composed of flowers." As the various festivals and events take place over the seasons the expo covers, the Sea of Flowers Area too will show different sides of the world of flowers.

At the Expo Arena, meanwhile, you will find a performance area for 676 different artistic and cultural events to be held over the course of the show. The spacious, beamless arena-big enough to hold three basketball courts-is also designed to be folded up and put into storage in just eight hours!

Not only will the expo have this rich variety of areas and events, it will also boast a rotating array of 30 million flowers, creating a green wonderland for the full 171 days. At the Pavilion of Regimen there will be 350 centegenarian trees; at the Expo Dome, between 800 and 1,000 species of rare orchid; at the Pavilion of Future, over 1,500 species of plants from climates polar to tropical; at the Yuanshan and Dajia Riverside Park Areas, a brocade of flowers like a sprawling ocean of color. The real test, though, has been of Taiwan's floricultural industry, which normally only produces 60 million plants a year.

"For just this one expo, not even a full half-year long, we're using almost a half of Taiwan's total floricultural productivity," says Ting Hsi-yung. "It'll be a heck of a challenge!" But the even bigger challenge, according to Ting, will be keeping the climate right for the plants-if that fails, they could wither, wilt, and possibly be attacked by bugs or disease.

"Most exhibitions only have to worry about whether the venue is sound and set up properly, and then people can visit whenever they want," says Ting, "but the Flora Expo is different. The expo on show around the opening ceremony and the one around the closing ceremony will be massively different, because flowers don't stick around that long. They need to be changed out a lot, so basically every month it'll almost be a whole new expo."

This Flora Expo has also set a number of records and benchmarks. For example, all six newly constructed halls are green buildings; there will be almost 7,000 performances in 11 locations, the most in the expo's history; it will also be the world's first such world-class expo to be simultaneously held in an urban centre, parks, and a riverside area. Together, they make the show a hard one to replicate.

"Almost 98.6% of the first stage of tickets on sale were bought online, a new record for the International Association of Horticultural Producers," says Ting proudly, adding that everything about the expo, from the initial planning and design to the engineering and operations, is "made in Taiwan."

More importantly, by competing against 22 countries in the landscaping competitions and 30 in the floriculture ones, "Taiwan has a chance to take some prizes and show the world the kind of 'soft power' Taiwan can exercise in this area."

The Taipei City Government, the main organizers of the expo, hope that the event will bring Taipei residents together and help build an image for the city as the "Garden City," giving the expo a resonance long after the flowers have faded and creating a new driving force for the people of Taipei to pursue more beautiful lives.

Some of the focal-point flowers of the expo: Pleione formosana; Schomburgkia thomsoniana; the Taiwan-developed calla lily "Burgundy Lady"; and Myosotis sylvatica, more commonly known as "forget-me-not."

The Four Park Areas of the Flora Expo

Some of the focal-point flowers of the expo: Pleione formosana; Schomburgkia thomsoniana; the Taiwan-developed calla lily "Burgundy Lady"; and Myosotis sylvatica, more commonly known as "forget-me-not."

Some of the focal-point flowers of the expo: Pleione formosana; Schomburgkia thomsoniana; the Taiwan-developed calla lily "Burgundy Lady"; and Myosotis sylvatica, more commonly known as "forget-me-not."

Top to bottom: Maidenhair fern; staghorn (photo by Hsueh Chi-kuang); telegraph grass, which seems to dance in response to light or sound; the fuzzball-like Espostoa cactus; and a 1500-year-old bonsai cypress.

Top to bottom: Maidenhair fern; staghorn (photo by Hsueh Chi-kuang); telegraph grass, which seems to dance in response to light or sound; the fuzzball-like Espostoa cactus; and a 1500-year-old bonsai cypress.

Top to bottom: Maidenhair fern; staghorn (photo by Hsueh Chi-kuang); telegraph grass, which seems to dance in response to light or sound; the fuzzball-like Espostoa cactus; and a 1500-year-old bonsai cypress.

Top to bottom: Maidenhair fern; staghorn (photo by Hsueh Chi-kuang); telegraph grass, which seems to dance in response to light or sound; the fuzzball-like Espostoa cactus; and a 1500-year-old bonsai cypress.

(above and left) Of all the pavilions and halls in the expo, only one has no real flowers-the Pavilion of Dreams. Instead, this pavilion is full of cutting-edge interactive digital technology, which is combined with artistic creativity to replicate processes like blooming and pollination.