00:00It's the annual cue to emerge from winter hibernation.
00:06I'm so excited.
00:07I've never seen this park more colourful for opening day of Floriade.
00:11More than a million flowers will bloom over the next month for the 37th year of Canberra's
00:17Anchor Tourism event, running with the theme Art in Bloom.
00:21Music, film, literature, paint, all the different medias.
00:27After 18 months of planning, horticulturalists have been working overtime to protect the
00:31flowers from last month's unseasonably warm weather, but the winter heat planted a seed
00:37among organisers who'll assess whether Floriade should start slightly earlier next year.
00:43We'll take some advice from the horticulturalists on that, but I think there is increasing evidence
00:48that we will need to just make some small adjustments.
00:52Today might be a fairly chilly spring day, but from Saturday, organisers are hoping that
00:58the weather will turn it on and bring more than 450,000 people through the gates over
01:04the next four weeks.
01:06We see a younger crowd coming and enjoying Commonwealth Park in terms of the local aspect,
01:15but our tourism is generally an older group of people.
01:21Adding $50 million to the Canberra economy.
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