I am not keen on including staging as a criterion for judging collections. Each sponsoring club has a unique situation with the availability of blocks and tubes and you frequently see that you need to make adaptations to stage a collection. That’s why you see stacked blocks and mismatched containers. The availability of greens may also be limited, so mixes of taxus and boxwood should not be considered a flaw either.
OTOH, we could each travel with a small trailer hitched to the back of the car. The trailer would have a full set of domestic and imported Denis-Dailey-beer-bottles and a taxus or boxwood shrub or two.
I would save such criteria for design classes. The collection classes are to demonstrate skill in growing (and selecting of course) show-worthy flowers.
Bill Lee
Bill,
You raise a point that needs clarification: what is “staging”?
To me, it is what the exhibitor has done to make the exhibit appealing, within the constraints of the show. It should not involve what the exhibitor cannot control.The exhibitor has no control over what stuffing is provided, and usually little over the properties either. The judges should survey the show – just as they do to ascertain overall quality to guide their standards to be used for awards – and notice what was available for staging of collections.
Most often, “Staging” should be primarily the choice of blooms and the arrangement of the blooms by size, colors and stem length. In appropriate classes, perhaps the distribution/representation across Divisions. And the uniformity of the use of stuffing (not a clump in some and only strands in another).
Bob
Bill,
As much as I laughed at the beer bottles as introducted by Dennis. I do think that some effort needs to be taken to include staging. I’m not talking about “judging” the boxwood, or whatever. I’m talking about presentation of the entire collection. Some people are just lousy stagers and usually they are great people. My friend Richard Ezell is the exception he is a great person and a great stager. LOL.
My experience is that if we can get past the “worst” daffodil determining who wins a collection and use the method as proposed by Kirby, the best presentation will win the collections. And that is staging. Here’s another, however, you still have to have the “Great” daffodils to win. For example, I was helping another member at a show a couple years ago, and I started telling her to exchange these two flowers, put this one here and move that one over there. I was using the flowers she had already staged, but improving the presentation and she won the Bozievich Award and afterwards said that she wished that she had my “eye” for daffodils. It wasn’t my “eye” that did it, it was improving her presentaion with the experience I had gained in showing daffodils. e.g., one of her daffodils on the end was sitting next to her competitions’ collection and the competitor’s super daffodil and hers was a 90 + but not as beautiful. I simply had her move one of her best daffodils so it would be next to her competitor’s best daffodil so that the entire collection would not look inferior and give the judges a bad opinion of the collection when they first walked up. That way, it make the judges have to consider the entire collection and not just think from the start that it was an inferior collection. She had great daffodils, she just needed to let the daffodils say that. To me that is staging and presentation.
I think there would be great difficulty in determining what when into staging if we gave it points. I think it is a great idea with merit but the implementation will not be easy and quiet possible just skew the judging.
Clay
Clay Higgins
