Cheng Hsiu-wei (鄭秀煒), who began a career in floral design by selling flowers as a street vendor, won a gold medal at the Chelsea Flower Show for outstanding floral design on May 24 in London. Now she says she hopes one day to decorate Buckingham Palace with orchids from Taiwan.
“This is not only a dream. Dreams come true when they are heartfelt,” she said.
Cheng began selling earrings, necklaces and nail polish at a street stall after graduating from college.
Photo courtesy of Cheng Hsiu-wei
After she was married, Cheng and her husband opened a flower stall by their home in Chungli, Taoyuan County, with a start-up cost of less than NT$3,000.
After earning some money, they opened a flower shop, but business was slow. She decided to close the store and moved all of her flowers outside for a final sale.
At one point a Buddhist nun went through her store and told her: “Flowers make people happy. Selling flowers could bring good fortune.”
After that, Cheng changed her mind and decided to keep the store open.
However, Cheng altered her business strategy after studying floral design with the aim of turning flowers into stylish works of art.
“I studied floral design in Germany and Switzerland, and often watched flower shows in Japan, the US and European countries. Over a decade, I invested more than NT$10 million [US$347,000] in learning floral design,” she said.
However, her floral designs did not prove popular in Taiwan. Traditionally, Taiwanese like to decorate weddings with red flowers, which represent good fortune. On one occasion, clients were so upset that she added white lilium formosanum to red roses that they plucked them out.
Most clients did not like her designs and her husband recommended that she limit herself to selling flowers, while providing simple arrangements free of charge.
Refusing to give up, Cheng began to explain her design ideas to her clients.
“Because of my insistence, my floral designs gained acceptance with a growing number of people,” she said.
The Chelsea Flower Show is seen as the Oscars of floral design, she said, adding that this was the only flower show officially visited by Queen Elizabeth II.
Cheng made her first entry at the Chelsea Flower Show competition last year, where she won a silver medal.
“We were not as well prepared in 2010, given the limited amount of time we had to plan and design our display,” she said.
“This year we chose to use 100 different orchids in the pavilion,” she said, adding that the display resembled a church filled with 4,000 orchids, from 100 different varieties.
The hard work finally paid off, Cheng said.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
RSS