Green Promotion

Green Ambassador Scheme

Following the recommendations released by the urban greening task force in 2009, we implemented a Green Ambassador (GA) Scheme. Leading members of the community, including Legislative Council and District Council (DC) members, are invited to serve as GAs and help promote community involvement in the surveillance of trees. By March 2015, over 350 prominent citizens had joined the scheme.

Hong Kong Flower Show 2015

The Hong Kong Flower Show was held at Victoria Park from March 20 to 29, 2015. The show, which this year gave pride of place to the Oncidium genus of orchids, attracted over 590 000 people.

The Flower Show had over 350 000 flowering plants on display, including 8 000 examples of Oncidium in addition to many other exotic flowers and plants from all over the world. The show also featured magnificent floral art displays by horticultural groups from Hong Kong, the Mainland and overseas. Participants included over 210 horticultural organisations, private firms and government departments from Hong Kong and the Mainland, Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Estonia, Singapore, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

In addition to major attractions such as landscape designs, flower arrangements, and displays of potted plants and bonsai, the show delivered a wide range of educational and entertainment programmes. These included horticultural talks, flower arrangement demonstrations, cooking demonstrations, musical performances, cultural presentations, exhibits, drawing and photo competitions, greening activity workshops, green promotional stalls and guided tours, all designed to promote interest in horticulture and the greening of Hong Kong.

The starlit garden, a new attraction this year, was lit with intelligent fibre-optic lighting equipment, creating an array of colourful light beams alternating in response to music, creating an iridescent starlight fantasia for visitors.

Besides accepting cash payment for admission, we continued to accept Octopus payments to reduce queuing times.

Green HK Campaign

Under the community greening programme, the department organised the Best Landscape Award for Private Property Development 2014 in June, designed to improve the environment of private properties by encouraging good landscape design and horticultural maintenance. The award attracted 190 entries. In addition, over 140 green promotional and outreach activities were held, with around 41 000 people taking part.

Some 5 100 Green Volunteers from the 18 districts were recruited under the Green Volunteer Scheme to carry out simple horticultural maintenance in parks. These volunteers also served as stewards at green promotional activities. In 2014-15, around 480 greening activities were organised for the Green Volunteers.

The Community Garden Programme, which covers all 18 districts, encourages the public to participate in community-level greening activities and to adopt green practices in their daily lives. The programme is also designed to raise public awareness of environmental protection issues through gardening activities. The 18 districts now boast 22 community gardens. In 2014-15, 55 gardening courses were organised for more than 12 000 participants.

The department continued to work with the DCs and local communities to organise Community Planting Days throughout the year. In 21 planting days, involving over 5 200 participants, 41 trees and 25 360 shrubs were planted.

The Greening School Subsidy Programme, conducted during the year as part of a school greening programme, provided subsidies of $4.6 million to 881 schools and kindergartens. The money is used to help make school campuses greener and to provide green educational activities for students, with the assistance of part-time instructors. The greening projects were assessed, and the winning schools received a Greening School Project Award. Around 372 000 students were given pots of seedlings to nurture at home or at school under the ‘One Person, One Flower’ Scheme, which develops interest in greening by encouraging young people to grow plants.