The other day, methought, I heard nature let out a sigh of relief. The Valletta Green Festival was over, and with it the shameless charade that once a year invades the city in the form of potted fakery that presents itself as green – in some way pro-environment, that is – but is in fact the exact opposite.  

I’d rather not say much about the aesthetic merits of the infiorata. I suppose it’s a matter of personal taste. Speaking for myself, I fail to follow the reasoning that holds that mediocre design looks good when it is magnified to gigantic size. I did look for a similar idea in Gulliver’s Travels, only what I found suggested quite the opposite.    

This year’s theme, yawn, was a festa bandalora (street decoration). I suppose that makes sense, given the current notion that nothing succeeds like more of the same, so long as it is big and out of season. We now have a combined four festi in April, a summer carnival, a carnival on the first Sunday of Lent, and so on. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if someone came up with plans for a Christmas market in July, with stalls selling prinjolata and festa fireworks.

My point, however, is elsewhere. A good place to start is Peter Calamatta, the Chair of the Environmental Landscapes Consortium (ELC) that is the technical mind behind the infiorata and the Valletta Green Festival. Calamatta was there at the opening with Jason Micallef and the rest, telling us how green and good and uplifting the festival would be.   

It strikes me that Calamatta is rather like his infiorata, and like the landscaped roundabouts his consortium manages: gaudy, self-publicising, and the opposite of what appears. Calamatta fancies himself as a crooner, for example, and has even released a couple of albums that ought to come with an animal-rights disclaimer: ‘No cats were strangled in the making of these songs’.

The ELC is one of the worst things that has happened to the Maltese environment in recent years

Still, Calamatta’s warblings, and the books he writes about himself, are his business entirely. What isn’t his business is his career in landscaping the places that are also mine, assuming I qualify as a member of the public. Which brings me to the ELC.

I don’t have a problem with roses. They’re fine flowers that are perfectly agreeable to look at, in the right places and in moderate measure. Nor do I take issue with turf lawns, pansies and geraniums in flower beds, and such.

What I do take exception to is roses, turf, pansies, and geraniums that profess to be something they are the exact opposite of. I especially dislike it when they take over every inch of space in the name of that something.

There is absolutely nothing green about the ELC. What they do may be decorative, but it’s labour-intensive, wasteful of resources and completely out of touch with natural ecosystems. Not the standard definition of ‘environmental’, then.

Take San Anton. It’s a garden, and therefore kept with the enjoyment of its human visitors in mind. Until recently, however, San Anton was also of considerable botanical and ecological value. Its lines of flowering hedges, for example, would teem with bees and butterflies. Now, and thanks to the ELC, that’s mostly gone. San Anton is effectively a gigantic roundabout, and equally non-environmental.

The ELC is all about gangs of men in orange who plant colourful but sterile things, only to proceed to dig them up and replace them soon after. Geraniums, for example, are treated as the annual plants they aren’t and dug up and replaced every few weeks. The turnover rate of planting on roundabouts would be astonishing, if we didn’t also know that it meant higher profits for the ELC. (That’s probably also the reason why they don’t just use plastic flowers.)

When not circulating pansies, the ELC is usually fiddling about with water sprinklers – in a country where water is a scarce resource. It also specialises in signs that tell us to keep off the turf, and that the place is lovingly managed by the ELC. Looks like free advertising to me, but never mind.

The ELC calling itself environmental, and the infiorata posing as a green festival, is exceptionally brazen and deceitful. What the ELC really is, is a missed chance to develop methods of gardening that complement natural ecosystems and respect the realities of Malta’s climate and resources.

I’m not saying that gardens and roundabouts should be left to overgrow with thistles and wild grasses to attract butterflies, or that non-indigenous plants should be outlawed. That would be a kind of environmental fascism, of which there is some about but hopefully not in this column.

The argument is that landscaping and gardening that are truly environmental seek some sort of balance between the decorative and the environmentally sensible. Take oleander trees and lantana shrubs, neither of which require much watering or attention beyond the occasional pruning. Oleanders are a Mediterranean species that produces the most beautiful flowers for several months a year, lantana a non-indigenous kind that grows easily and is excellent for pollinators. Both make perfect sense, and the ELC has declared war on both.

Far from being a festival of green, the ELC is one of the worst things that has happened to the Maltese environment in recent years. Not surprising, given that the directors are a crooner who can’t croon and a contractor (Charles Polidano iċ-Ċaqnu) whose environmental credentials could be listed on a grain of rice.

mafalzon@hotmail.com