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Kathy Griffin

GREENFINGERS Florist is the florist of the fashionable. It was used by Joyce and Loewe during recent fashion shows at the Landmark and has a number of corporate clients. Its Wyndham Street shop is filled with cool, minimalist designs.

 Flowers are secondary to the leafy sculptures, and a small fountain and soft music provide gentle, background accompaniment.

 It was surprising, therefore, to discover the owner is anything but fashionable.

 Ken Chan Hing-yeung is a humble, 40-something scientist with a master's degree in botany, glasses, plain clothes and haircut, and a quiet-spoken manner, who grew up in To Kwa Wan with little exposure to the plant world. His family always had a Christmas tree - his father designed Christmas decorations but the tree was artificial.

 'I was very brave to set up something in fact I knew nothing about,' he admitted.

 How he came to be both botanist and designer is hard to explain. Perhaps the influence of his father encouraged him to look at design, though Mr Chan cannot say. The love of plants came seemingly out of the blue, when he was in his first year at Chinese University studying biology in preparation for medical school.

 Mr Chan and friends travelled from Guangzhou to Inner Mongolia but he had no money for souvenirs, so he collected seeds instead and tried to grow them back in Hong Kong.

 'I usually picked the seeds up from parks and roadsides,' he said. 'I was amazed and surprised by the great variety of plants I saw - Hong Kong is such a small place and you hardly see any varieties - and from then on I had a new view of the plant world.'  He switched his studies to botany, completing a three-centimetre thick master's thesis on the structure of oat seeds at the University of Hong Kong. Hardly the beginnings of a florist.

 'None of my classmates became florists,' he said. 'Graduates of botany or biology look at themselves as scientists. Being a florist, you need an artistic sense.'  Mr Chan was driven to become a florist more by business sense. He taught for a year after completing his thesis but that was unsatisfying, and he decided he wanted to set up business for himself.

 His first choice was horticulture but that required land and he did not have the money. So he chose flower-arranging.

 'Fourteen years ago the standard of florists was not very high and if you had artistic sense and some understanding of flowers, you could be a florist. Today it's more competitive,' he said.

 He opened his first shop on Woo Sung Street near Tsim Sha Tsui, which is still operating, and began reading everything he could about floral design.

 His study of the subject culminated in 1993 with a three-month trip to Holland, a centre for floral design.

 Most of his customers want the usual type of arrangement - a dozen roses or bouquet - so he puts his artistry to greatest effect for special assignments. For the fashion shows, for instance, he consulted closely with the clients.

  Joyce wanted something simple so he drilled rocks, inserted aluminium holders and placed a single white flower in each vase. Loewe wanted something to complement its leatherware so he created tree-bark holders, chose rustic flowers and treated leaves to give them a leathery look.

 His most impressive designs have strong, uncluttered lines - which comes back to his botany. In science, the study of the forms of plants and their components is called morphology and it is Mr Chan's favourite subject.

 He brings out books of artists and photographers who, while not botanists, have used the beautiful shapes of plants and their cells to create works of art, from a rainbow spectrum made of leaves picked up at different times of the year to a close-up of a horse chestnut magnified 12 times, which looks like a carved wooden spear.

 'As a botanist I was amazed at their instincts in capturing the very special features of the plants,' he said.

 He is trying to cultivate those instincts in others by running classes on floral designs. One of his students, Stella Cheng Suet-yin, said she used to pass by florist shops with barely a glance until she came across Mr Chan's shop. Now she spends her spare time studying with him and speaks like a convert.

 'He knows how the flowers feel; he can control how they open and close, and he has a very good artistic sense,' she said. 'He uses rocks or apples or pumpkins as holders and he can mix fresh, dried and silk flowers all together in harmonious way. I've learned a lot from him about colour, texture and form.'  But Mr Chan, humble scientist that he is, is oblivious to the praise and prefers to talk about plants and flowers instead.

 'There are more than 200,000 flowering plants but most florists only explore a very small part of that,' he said.

 'What I'm trying to do is look into a wider spectrum of the plant world that I have been allowed to be exposed to as a botanist and integrate this view into my design.'  Business considerations are not forgotten, although lately they have not dominated.

 He used to have his second shop in Wan Chai but moved it to Wyndham Street, Central, in the summer because it gave him the space to have his ideal shop - despite the recession.

 'If I was really a businessman, I wouldn't open this shop at this time. But I want to make one flower shop which is really outstanding and different in Hong Kong,' he said, as he gazed at the fountain. 'I think every flower shop should have the sound of water and music.' 



Opened up to the feeling of flower power