Thousands Take Last Looks--and Sniffs

For people watching the Rose Parade on television, there was no way to tell that a turtle’s shell on one float had been decorated with snow peas or that one entry made to look like a concert hall was intricately festooned with sunflower seeds and lima beans.

“That’s why you come to the float viewing,” said Pasadena resident Rex Heesseman. “To get up close. On TV, you only see a float for a few seconds.”

About 80,000 people had converged on northeast Pasadena by Saturday for float-viewing, the final public homage to the wilting, botanical contraptions before they are dismantled. Forty-nine floats from the parade, all but Disney’s “California Adventure,” were on display like a mobile garden.

The scent of hot dogs and kettle corn competed with the perfume of more than 20 million flowers lining a two-mile path along Sierra Madre and Washington boulevards.

“It’s like going to a buffet of flowers,” said Rick Andrew, an amateur gardener from Rancho Cucamonga who has attended the post-parade event for eight years. Although it rained steadily during the festivities Friday, the sogginess had its advantages.

“It’s wonderful,” said Linda Klausner, post-parade chairwoman for the Tournament of Roses. “The colors vibrate. The roads are not over-crowded. Rain for the flowers is a good thing.”

Klausner said the plants may have been preserved a few days longer because of the humidity and cool temperatures. Last year, she said, the heat caused many flowers to go limp and discolor.

Some floats clearly suffered from the rain. The Eastman Kodak showboat looked rusted: The black seaweed used to decorate the smokestacks had stained the white rice and coconut that represented white woodwork.

The pineapples, bananas, potatoes and chilies left in the rain one day and baked under the sun the next smelled more like garbage than fresh produce on the Starbucks entry, a float celebrating a marketplace in the city of Antigua in the coffee-producing nation of Guatemala.

The rain seemed fitting for the China Airlines float, a tropical garden highlighted by a 21-foot-tall bride and groom in traditional Chinese garb. The moss and fungus that adorned the rocks on the side glistened in the drizzle.

By Saturday, throngs of people were surrounding displays such as the float for Rain Bird Corp., a sprinkler company, snapping pictures of the two spotted owls colored with sugar pine cone petals. The platform also included eight working waterfalls.

“It’s so realistic,” said Yuonne Koopmanschap, a visitor from the Netherlands, a country famous for its horticulture. “It’s beautiful, but they probably should have used more flowers.”

The project took 7,000 hours to decorate, said Tim Estes, owner of Phoenix Floats, which had 13 entries in this year’s parade. Each of his floats had about 190,000 flowers. “It was a great parade,” he said. “But now I can’t wait until the next one.”