A flowering of imagination

Liang cut his teeth on arranging flowers for Tian'anmen Square in the '90s, when he and his colleagues needed to deliver different themes and patterns every year.

The challenging opportunities allowed him to work with senior staff members, tackling problems and delivering refined floral artworks, which saw him quickly hone his skills and upgrade understanding of the art.

In the early 2000s, Liang started to focus on traditional flower arrangement studies, and was then invited to arrange flowers for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

The main flower used in the bouquet for the Olympic awards was moonflower, which means flourishing and prosperity, and its number in any bouquet is usually nine, which is homonymous with the Chinese word meaning everlasting, Liang explains.

Other flowers included Reineckia carnea, fragrant plantain lily and hypericum, and six of them were used in each bouquet to suggest a smooth ride.

Liang checked every single bouquet when it was done, before signing off on it being packaged in a box.

"The bouquet-making process was rigorous and complicated, and there was no room for negligence in any step," he says.

"Every leaf and blossom also had to be examined before they were taken out from the cold store," he says, adding that the best scenario was nothing would come off when the athletes waved them over their heads.

Decades of experience with flowers have enabled Liang to deliver splendid floral artworks and be named an inheritor of traditional Chinese flower arrangement by the China Flower Arrangement Association in 2013.