Loy Zarate is the operations manager of the King Louis nurseries. (Photo by NOEL B. PABALATE)

MANILA, Philippines - Baguio is set to be blooming with colorful flowers this weekend as the city’s ongoing Panagbenga Festival culminates with a splashy parade of floats adorned with countless flowers. This showcase promises to dazzle the thousands of spectators expected to crowd Baguio’s most famous thoroughfare, Session Road.

A significant percentage of these showstopping flowers will be sourced from King Louis Flowers and Plants, Inc., which operates flower nurseries in Benguet and Mountain Province.

The name King Louis is synonymous with flower festivals and garden shows.  It often takes part in landscaping events held at the Manila Seedling Bank, the open grounds of the Quezon City Hall, and the Quezon Memorial Circle. At almost every show in the past years, King Louis has walked off with the top prize, thanks to the incandescent Baguio-grown flowers and the brilliant artistry of King Louis resident landscape designer Francis Gener. The flowers and Gener are always a winning match and they have impressed judges year after year. It thus came to a point that both the designer and the flower company had to refrain from joining competitive garden events to allow the others to have their place in the sun. Both the brand King Louis and Gener have since been elevated to the hall of fame. Today, King Louis still joins the shows but as an exhibitor, and not as a competitor.

Efren M. Chatto has been heading the operations of King Louis since it was founded in the early 1980s. He was an officer of the Manila Banking Corporation, owned by the distinguished Puyat family. The late Teng Puyat, the bank’s head and family patriarch, decided to establish a flower farm based in Baguio. As it happened, the Puyats own several properties in the city. Baguio was the perfect place to grow plants that can thrive only in countries like Holland. Puyat thus asked Chatto to help establish and operate the farm, which was named after Teng Puyat’s son Luis.

Chatto recalls it was a difficult time to open a new company. This was in the early 1980s, when the country was beset with political and economic upheavals.  “And I had no experience in running a flower farm,” says the former banker. “We hired European consultants to oversee the farms for the first two to three years. Aside from their expertise, we also imported their seedlings.”

King Louis has since survived several economic downturns and like the flowers it produces, it’s flourishing beautifully. Chatto and his team had learned so much from the European consultants. Add the usual plant care comprised by a “gift package of showers, sun, and love” to this expertise and you have nurseries abloom with shimmering roses, poinsettias, and gerberas, among many others. Aside from Baguio, King Louis also operates farms in Bukidnon in Mindanao, where chrysanthemums are planted.

Thrice a week, fresh flowers are shipped to various shops at the Dangwa strip in Manila and at the King Louis shop in the Manila Seedling Bank.  It also exports flowers to countries like Japan.  And in a surprising turns of events, King Louis now exports the young bulbs of the colored Calla to Holland!

It is Loy Zarate who manages the farm operations in Benguet and Mountain Province, where roses are grown at a nursery near the town of Bontoc. At the nursery located off Naguillan Road in Baguio, gerberas of various colors are in full bloom. Zarate says the gerbera is a popular cut flower and it grows and blooms quickly. “They can easily be replenished, even if we suddenly get an order for hundreds of gerberas for an event like the Panagbenga,” he says.

King Louis has become a sort of institution in Baguio and this may be attributed to the Panagbenga.  It played an important role in the first two Panagbenga festivals, which began in the early 1990s. “We had our own float during the first two years,” says Zarate.  “Now we just supply the flowers for some of the floats. We get orders of 6, 000 to 10, 000 flowers each year just for the parade.”

The company had to stop fielding its own float after it won the grand prize during the first two years of the festival. “So we were elevated to the hall of fame again,” says Francis Gener while laughing.

Gener has been working as the landscape designer for King Louis for over 20 years now.  Prior to that, he worked with Newtown, a real estate development located in Bulacan, also owned by the Puyats. Gener was hired by Newtown after he graduated from De La Salle University with a degree in Agriculture. He did landscaping projects on the side and later decided to try his luck in Jeddah, where he served as an assistant to British landscape architect William Bessler and local landscape architect Saud Mazoub. He learned a lot from those two designers, he says.

When he returned to Manila in the mid 1980s, he was quickly hired by the Puyats again, this time for King Louis. Although the company doesn’t compete in the Panagbenga anymore, it still gets commissioned to do the floats of the other participants. It supplies both the flowers and the design by Gener. For this year, the company is doing the floats of the Department of Tourism and Samsung.

“The DoT float will feature the Cordillera theme,” says Gener. “The float will be dominated by chrysanthemums and everlasting flowers, all designed to capture the natural landscape of the region. We’ll be using around 2,500 flowers.”

Gener is also busy designing the Samsung float, which will require 3,000 flowers and will highlight an “Alice in Wonderland” theme.  Like the DoT float, the Samsung float will be dominated by everlasting flowers, which are known for their resplendent hues.  The float’s other props will include actors Andi Eigenmann and Sam Milby, dressed as Alice and The Mad Hatter, respectively. Their names may sound foreign, but the two stars will be frolicking in a gleaming wonderland of homegrown flowers. Alice in the wonderland of King Louis should make the perfect title for this float.

For inquiries about King Louis, call 929-4110.