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.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS