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Flower lovers, here’s one for you. The magnificent Flower Carpet will return to Brussels this August for the first time since 2018. Almost 1,700 square metres of begonias, dahlias, grass and bark will be tightly packed into a city-centre square and provide the backdrop for a series of sound and light shows in the Belgian capital.
The display will be assembled by a team of around 100 volunteers from a non-profit called Tapis de Fleurs. It happens every two years, with this year’s edition explicitly harking back to the very first Flower Carpet in the square in 1971.
Equally as spectacular as the actual flowers, however, is the setting. The carpet takes over the city’s grand, gothic Grand-Place, a Unesco world heritage site. The square itself is free to access, though for €7 (£6, $7.30) you’ll be able to get extra spectacular views of the carpet from the balcony of the city’s town hall.
The first Flower Carpet was made by landscape architect Etienne Stautemas, who went on to do similar shows in the likes of Paris, London, Amsterdam and Buenos Aires. The 2022 edition offers a contemporary update of Stautemas’s original work, featuring the designs of Roo and Koen Vondenbusch, with around a million flowers being used overall.
This year’s Flower Carpet will take place from August 12 to 15 and feature light-and-sound shows in the evenings. You can find out more and buy tickets here.
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