The Vatican’s Easter floral display this year will carry a message of hope amid ongoing wars with a Maltese florist playing a key role in the decorations at St Peter’s Basilica.
For the third consecutive year, floral designer David Grech was chosen to form part of a select group of only four florists to plan and design the floral arrangements with the help of an army of gardeners from the Vatican.
Apart from Grech, there were two florists from Slovenia and one from Croatia.
And this year’s display, using orchids donated by the Slovenian government, departed from the traditional Easter yellow and white colour scheme to deliver a special message.
“We wanted to use Spring colours and give a message of hope amid ongoing wars. Spring brings hope after Winter and we tried to ride on that theme,” Grech explained.
The florists started planning the Easter flowers straight after Christmas but had only three days to assemble the displays, working long, gruelling hours to complete everything by midday on Saturday.
All smiles after working long hours to complete the floral displays inside St Peter’s Basilica in time for Easter Mass. Photo courtesy of David GrechSpeaking to Times of Malta from Rome, Grech described how he has been working 12 hours a day since Maundy Thursday to finish the displays on time.
“On Wednesday I had to decorate two churches in Malta. Then I flew to Rome, landing at 2am. By 6am I was already walking towards the Vatican to begin working on the flowers,” Grech said.
A highly qualified nurse by profession who manages a hospital in Malta, 50-year old Grech developed a passion for floral arrangements as a teenager when he took up a part-time job at a florist shop to earn money to pay for his exams.
“My family was very poor and I needed to save up LM7 to pay for my exams. I used to be paid 50c a week and I would scrounge around from the bin of discarded flowers to create my arrangements. Now I have a passion for floral design,” he recalled.
Today, he is just as passionate about his sideline as a floral designer as he is about his day job as a nurse-manager. So much so that he will not be staying on to enjoy the floral displays on Easter Sunday as he will already be back in Malta on duty in the hospital.
“I had to take leave to come to Rome and I couldn’t take any more days off,” Grech said.
As a nurse, Grech has worked in several global hot spots including Haiti after the earthquake, delivering medical aid in Libya, assisting after the tsunami in Sri Lanka and during the war in Kosovo. And it was his work in humanitarian aid that led him to be selected as one of the Vatican’s floral arrangers.
“I was assisting with humanitarian aid following the earthquake in Turkey three years ago when I posted some images of my floral work as well. A friend of mine who works as one of the gardeners of the Vatican saw them and got in touch. He invited me to join the meeting to plan for the Easter flowers,” Grech explained.
As he headed off to the airport to catch his flight back to Malta on Saturday evening, Grech confessed he was “exhausted but hugely satisfied” with the work, adding he would have loved his late father to have seen it all.
“I wish my late father were still alive to see this. He would have been very proud. He died four years ago so he never got to know about this work at the Vatican,” Grech said.