The Auckland Flower Show gets into full swing today.

Thousands of people are expected at Alexandra Park Raceway to see the inaugural show, which sprung up when Christchurch bought the rights to the Ellerslie Flower Show.

With family budgets tighter, growing your own food is a theme of several of the show's exhibition gardens.

The "Meat and Two Vege" garden shows how people can make the most of a small space by growing vegetables in raised gardens and in hanging troughs. The garden also has beehives for pollination of the plants and a pond containing eels, makes up the "meat" contingent of the garden's name.

Water conservation is the theme of the Kai ora ai te wai garden where rain water collected from the roof flows into a pond. Aquatic plants in the pond cleanse the water before it drips into a planter box below, watering the plants.

Two gardens have baths as their themes.

The "Create Your Own Eden" garden has environmentally friendly ideas on recycling kitchen and garden organic waste. It uses composting systems and worm farms to deal with food and garden waste, which in turn, creates fertiliser for the garden.

The "Armagarden" garden depicts meteor storm and volatile events and represents the end of the world due to "negligence and unsustainable caretaking."

A feature borrowed from the Ellerslie Flower Show is the vegetable person. This year, a Cleopatra has been developed. Dressed in a light green gown made of New Zealand-grown Chinese cabbage leaves, her face framed in ringlets made of purple asparagus spears. She reclines on a mattress of red onions and is surrounded by potato cobblestones.

This year's floral art section is being held on a floor inside the stadium. A highlight is the "Floral Extravaganza" display which features stands of bamboo stalks adorned with orchards, peonies, roses, tulips and lilies and surrounded by fish ponds.

Shopping opportunities include bird baths with birds on the side sculptured by Will Wilson and a wide variety of plants.

While the show's venue is not as dramatic as the Auckland Regional Botanic Gardens setting where the Ellerslie Flower Show was held, the new show is in a more compact space and with a stadium on site, showgoers have more shelter if it rains.