Odense Flower Festival
The team originates from the world of Hans Christian Andersen and expresses itself through a wealth of creative interpretations.
The ability of nature and imagination to return eternally is clearly evident in Hans Christian Andersen's story “The Phoenix,” which is the inspiration for this year's major themed exhibition at Flakhaven.
From seed to eternal bloom
- 150th anniversary of H.C. Andersen's death
In 2025, the Odense Flower Festival will join the rest of the city in marking the 150th anniversary of H.C. Andersen's death. We will do so during the Odense Flower Festival with a tribute to the imagination and creativity that blossom so richly and diversely in H.C. Andersen's works. Through his art, H.C. Andersen has left an indelible mark on posterity, with his fairy tales, poems, novels, and paper cutouts continuing to inspire new interpretations. That is why this year's theme for the Odense Flower Festival is “From seed to eternal bloom.”
The Phoenix Garden
By Johs. Nørregaard Frandsen
In the 150th year since the death of Hans Christian Andersen, the Phoenix bird flies ever more beautifully. Experience the poetry of beauty and diversity.
It is 150 years since H.C. Andersen died on August 4, 1875. A great poet closed his eyes for the last time, but his art lives on and has grown in significance ever since. Hans Christian Andersen wrote many stories, poems, and fairy tales in which vitality and resurrection are recurring themes. He saw imagination, nature, faith, and artistic creativity as forces that could never be extinguished. In the short story “The Phoenix” from 1850, Hans Christian Andersen unfolds the wings of myth. The Phoenix is a mythical creature, a symbol of rebirth that is thousands of years old and known from Arabic, Egyptian, Phoenician, Greek, and Roman myths. Once every century, the bird burns to death in its nest, but at the same time an egg hatches in the flames and a new Phoenix is born.
At the end of the short story, “The Phoenix,” Andersen writes:
“In the Garden of Paradise, when you were born under the Tree of Knowledge, in the first rose, our Lord kissed you and gave you your rightful name—Poetry.” When Eve and Adam were driven out of the Garden of Paradise, God gave humans poetry, flowers, love, and hope. This is the constant focal point of Hans Christian Andersen's art. The vitality and poetry are in all things, but in flowers, in nature, and in art, they unfold especially as symbols under the mighty wings of the Phoenix.
This is what we should celebrate Hans Christian Andersen for: his eternal belief in imagination and eternity, in beauty and in the indestructibility of life. We should carry this with us in our memories of the poet who died 150 years ago but who is constantly reborn in the glowing embers of our imagination. We must cherish his memory. We do this not least by cherishing the sustainability, biodiversity, variety, colour and sensory explosion that the flower festival represents. Here, the Phoenix rises again and again.
By Professor Emeritus Johs. Nørregaard Frandsen, former Director of the Hans Christian Andersen Center at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense.