This week's spring weather allowed Egyptians to celebrate the traditional festival of Sham el-Nassim. Nesmahar Sayed and photographer Sherif Sonbol capture the mood Sham el-Nassim, dating back some 4,000 years, is one of the oldest Egyptian festivals, and it originates in ancient Egyptian celebrations of the beginning of spring with a variety of outdoor festivities, some of which continue to the present day. Among the customs associated with this day, which this year fell on 28 April, one of the most famous is the eating of feseekh, a kind of salted fish that was a symbol of fertility for the ancient Egyptians. As part of this year's festivities, the Al-Orman Park in Dokki, a large green space once part of the gardens of the Khedive Ismail's palace, is hosting its traditional spring flower show modeled on the famous annual Chelsea Flower Show in London. Designed to showcase main trends of the gardening year, the show began on 22 March and continues until 2 May and is held under the auspices of the ministry of agriculture. The Dokki show started in the 1920s and soon developed from a one-day event on the first day of the spring season into a weekly event with a competition offering a prize for the best flowers on show. The Al-Orman Park has been hosting the show regularly since it began, though it has also been held at other venues, including the Fish Garden in Zamalek, the Agriculture Museum in Dokki and the Andalos Park in Gezira. The Al-Orman Park has been the show's permanent home since 2004, and last year events were extended to cover an entire month. This year the organisers have decided to further extend the show to cover Sham el-Nassim. According to both the ancient Egyptian and the later Coptic calendar, Sham el-Nassim is observed on the first day of the Khamaseen season and the day after Coptic Easter. Touring the colourful exhibits on display at this year's flower show, visitors to the Al-Orman Park are likely to feel themselves transported into a kind of Garden of Eden, where the bustle of Cairo can be temporarily forgotten and they can relax amid plants and flowers all displyed in beautiful arrangements. Despite the sometimes high prices of the plants and flowers on display, judging by the many visitors to the show there seems to be a large clientele for them among Egyptians and foreigners alike. Ragaa Ibrahim, for example, a television presenter, visits the show every year and says that "I don't miss it, wherever it is held. The show has the advantage of assembling in one place all that one needs in terms of plants and flowers, saving the trouble of going to different nurseries to shop, especially with all the traffic jams that make movement in Cairo quite an ordeal. It is much more enjoyable to come here, and perhaps it is even cheaper if I buy everything I need here once a year." Prices of flowers and potted plants at the show start at one Egyptian pound, but they go very much higher, reaching stratospheric heights outside the range of most people's budgets. One such item on display this year is a palm tree priced at 150,000 pounds. "The owner refuses to sell it for less," Heba Abdel-Wahab, an accountant working in a garden and landscaping firm, says. Her firm, which specialises in designing gardens and installing artificial rocks and waterfalls, has a display at this year's show, and Abdel-Wahab finds the event a golden opportunity to get away from daily office routine and enjoy the idyllic scene, while at the same time minding the firm's stand. In her view the sometimes high prices of the items on display is partly the result of transportation costs and the cost of renting stands at the show. Items sold at the show are often more expensive than those available at the firm's main premises for these reasons, and many clients, aware of this, identify what they need at the show and then visit the firm's showrooms to buy them at lower prices. However, though Abdel-Wahab's firm works in this way, other companies do not. According to Ahmed Adel, an agent for an international firm that works in garden watering, "the exhibition is a great opportunity to meet with the end user, who will come to see what suits his or her villa." For Abdel-Wahab, clients usually have a good idea of the prices of what they want to buy, and most of the company's items have fixed prices. "Even if they are expensive in comparison to non-imported products, our company's products are cheaper in the long run, since they can save 30% on water consumption." Despite the abundance of flowers on display this year's show may have suffered as a result of the recent heat wave, and Mohamed Fawzi, who has been attending the show for the past seven years, says that the picture is not as rosy as the casual or first-time visitor might be tempted to believe. Last month's hot weather affected suppliers badly, he says, and had a bad effect on plants. The authorities at the Al-Orman Park also need to solve a shortage of water for the plants on display, he says, which can damage them, and they should think about more extensive use of air- conditioning for inside areas. Problems with heat notwithstanding, the authorities are working to upgrade the facility. This year witnessed the launching of the first Website for the flower show, for example, which can be accessed at <www.springflowers2008.com. The site's Webmaster, Hani El-Mehi, says it will help to attract more visitors. "It is a gift from our company to the Park," he says, and "it includes details about the exhibition and participants." According to Adel Aqeel, manager of the Al-Orman Park, this year the show hosted 170 producers of flowers and garden-related products. The shortage of water and services that some producers have complained about is due to a lack of funds, he says, and "although we did our best to reduce these problems before the show started, an exhibition area of some 28 feddans is in need of more resources than are available to us at the moment." "This is a scientific and historical place," he adds, "established in 1875 by the Khedive Ismail. It was designed as a botanical garden having 100,000 kinds of rare plant. It deserves to be treated better by everybody, not least by members of the public who visit the gardens and sometimes deal unkindly with the plants." Outside the period of the annual spring flower show, the Park's monthly income ranges from some 15 to 20 thousand Egyptian pounds. "Out of this we have to pay water and electricity bills, and in order to raise money we have had to apply to the ministry of agriculture to raise the admission fee from 50 piastres to a price that can help us target a category of visitors that will better appreciate the Park's long history and give us an opportunity to increase the quality of our services and plants." One project that will be launched soon is a Website, he says, the Orman Garden Site at <www.ormangarden.org, which will target "Egyptians, foreign researchers and academics, in addition to all those interested in flowers and gardens."
