Imagination blooms in Brussels garden

Brussels Grand Place, the city’s main square Brussels - Arab Today Brussels planted a make-believe garden in its medieval heart Wednesday and decked out city hall with flowers at the launch of a new event to alternate with its famed "flower-carpet." Some 100,000 visitors come into the city every two years for a glimpse of the breath-taking August "flower-carpet" - a million begonias laid out across the city's paved 15th-century Grand Place. But it takes two years to organise the event and in the interim "we hope to offer the public another flower show in alternate years around City Hall and the Grand Place," organiser Annette Katz said. For the new event, the Floralientime, organisers brought a score of carefully pruned, begonia-carpeted laurel trees onto the  square, along with brightly coloured model lambs. Until August 18, the grand reception rooms and hallways of the town hall dating back to the 15th-century have been decorated by several dozen floral designers with arrangements of "extraordinary technical prowess", Katz said. A two-metre-long (yard) arrangement in one reception area by international designer Tomas De Bruyne features 7,000 roses, sweetpeas, dahlias, hydrangeas and other species that took seven people two days to put together. Source: AFP