AS spring flowers burst into bloom, the thoughts of artists turn to nature… but, as Canberra Glassworks found when conceiving a Floriade-time show about glass and flowers, curators with floral expertise don’t grow on trees.

Enter Narelle Phillips, best known as the visual arts program manager at Tuggeranong Arts Centre, but with a secret life as a florist, trained in both art and floristry.

Staff at the Glassworks were tickled pink when they heard about this serendipitous combination of talents, so Phillips was quickly hired to harness the energies of glass artists, including Amanda Dziedzic, Benjamin Edols and Kathy Elliott, Rose-Mary Faulkner, Amy Hick, Sui Jackson, Peter Nilsson, Harriet Schwarzrock, Belinda Toll and Jonathon Westacott.

They’ve been working with top floral artists (the current trend she says is to call the art “bespoke florals”) Moxom + Whitney, Shizuko Barber, Bloomin Mad Floral Designs, Lady Larissa, Nature Child Botanical Designs and Peking Spring.

Raised in the Blue Mountains, Phillips trained in interdisciplinary studies multimedia and installation art in the University of Western Sydney’s old Nepean art school, but quickly realised she might need a day job, so went on to florist studies at nearby Richmond TAFE.

Over many years Phillips combined work in florist shops with raising a family, but once in Canberra she worked as a freelancer from home until taking up the job at Tuggeranong.

There were many challenges presented by the Glassworks, eager to show the public how flowers and glass could go together. Phillips used her extensive networks to contact Canberra’s top floral experts who, in turn, were attracted by the prospect of working alongside those bravest and toughest of artists – “glassies”.

“The real thing in floral art is riding along with the seasons, so when the Glassworks approached me to curate the show I had to think about glass and flowers and spring,” says Phillips.

“The ‘florals’ have really enjoyed finding a little corner in the Glassworks to install flowers,” she says, so there’ll be an unexpected stash of repurposed, cut-glass vessels, porcelain blooms sprouting from timber and some corners of “guerrilla gardening”.

Sure, there are sculptural glass works in the exhibition that are inspired by flowers, but there are none of those objects where flowers are embedded in glass.

The biggest challenge, she says, will be refreshing and maintaining the flowers through the exhibition’s run until October 30. Some are clever with plant materials, some use epiphytes and growing plants or succulents, while others created designs where plants dry and die.

Glass artists have their ideas, too. Edols and Elliot describe their work as “observing the colour and forms of leaves, pods, gourds and grass… trying to capture a fragment of the beauty evident in the natural world.”

“It’s all about glass and fresh flowers,” Phillips says, about bringing “the outdoors inside.”

“Fresh Glass”, at Canberra Glassworks, 11 Wentworth Avenue, Kingston, September 15-October 30.