The flowers that bloom in the Spring - tra la,

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Breathe promise of merry sunshine.

As we merrily dance and we sing - tra la,

We welcome the hope that they bring - tra la,

Of a summer of roses and wine.

- Nanki-Poo trilling the joys of spring in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado.

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Rapture! Rapture! As I begin writing this column, I see from the Final Trumpdown app on my smartphone that the time remaining of the obscene Trump presidency has dwindled down to 857 days, 20 hours, 10 minutes and a few fleeting seconds. More of this optimism-stoking countdown in a moment.

But first: Floriade, immodestly (almost Trumpianly) describing itself as "Australia's Biggest Celebration of Spring" is underway again in Canberra's Commonwealth Park and I am much enjoying (tra-la) my annual treat of not going to it.

And yet the pleasure the boycotting of it gives me (my boycott is in the spirit of Billy Collins' poem Consolation that begins "How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer") is tinged with regret. Floriade's themes are always so yawn-makingly bland and banal when, really, a gigantic festival of flowers could be made irresistibly exciting and edgy.

I have some ideas of my own but first point to last month's 24th annual Flower Carpet event in Brussels. There, 750,000 dahlia flowers were employed to decorate the city's Grand Square with a gigantic reproduction-celebration of Katsushika Hokusai's world-famous painting The Great Wave. Go online now to look and to gasp at it!

And so I prod Floriade's movers and shakers with the Big Idea that they might do something similar, perhaps florally reproducing, on a gigantic scale, famous Australian paintings.

John Brack's beloved 1969 oil painting Barry Humphries in the character of Mrs Edna Everage leaps to mind because it is so........

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