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| The Newport Flower Show |
One of the pleasures of being married to a serious gardener
who also happens to be a Master floral design judge is that you get to tag
along to the darnest things.
The Newport Flower Show is held annually toward the end of
June. It’s a wonderful event, held for a
worthy cause (the Preservation Society of Newport County), and held in a
jaw-dropping setting (Rosecliff, an oceanfront estate owned and maintained by
the aforementioned Preservation Society).
I’ve been to the show several times and even once
helped to build an exhibit there.
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| Betty, Dave, and Sandy at Crane Beach |
This year was special:
Betty was invited to judge its flower show, and two good friends were arriving
from the Midwest who were also judging.
Being asked to judge at Newport is a big deal; judges fly in in from all
over the country. Sandy, our friend from
Kentucky, and Dave, our friend from Illinois, agreed to come a few days early
so we could take them to our favorite beach and clam shack, and otherwise show
them a small slice of ‘our’ New England.
I thought my role in all of this ended when we had dinner
before we dropped them at their hotel on our third evening together. Instead, they casually asked Betty (and,
politely, included me) if she had a few spare hours the next day to, well,
assemble a pair of peacocks. Betty
enthusiastically agreed. The following
afternoon, we were on the magnificent grounds of Rosecliff.
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| Dave directs Sue Redden, our fellow volunteer |
The project seemed simple: here is a four-foot-wide fountain
on a pedestal; part of Rosecliff’s original design and, more or less, the
centerpiece of its front lawn. Here are
the wire-frame heads and bodies of two over-sized peacocks, ready to be covered with
green moss, plus an assortment of additional wire cages. Here is a box of Oasis, a water-retaining
product used by floral designers to keep their material fresh. Oh, and here are a dozen buckets filled with
roses, orchids, sea holly, hydrangea, eucalyptus, thistle, and other materials
whose names I can only guess.
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| Betty puts the finishing touches on the first peacock |
Dave had been given a vague design of what the finished
peacocks were supposed to look like. The
design, unfortunately, ignored some basic laws of gravity and physics. The peacock perched on the edge of the
fountain would never stay upright.
Moreover, the wire cages meant to hold the Oasis didn’t include openings
large enough to insert blocks of the stuff.
My first job as ‘helper’ was to canvass the estate to cadge wire cutters.
With monumental bags of sand and rocks, plus enough florist
and duct tape to wrap a mummy, the first peacock was made to stand at the lip
of the fountain, and an assemblage of Oasis-filled cages were ingeniously joined
to anchor the bird to the ground. The
peacock’s tail, five feet long and two feet wide, was created. Dave and Sandy worked together, calling for floral
material prepped by Betty and another volunteer, Sue. I cleared debris and fetched additional flowers
from buckets kept under a tent some distance away (did I mention Newport was
encased in fog so thick you couldn’t see Rosecliff a hundred yards away? Or
that it periodically rained?)
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| The second peacock takes shape, as it rains harder |
The first peacock was finished and Dave and Sandy set out to
create the second one, thankfully located on the ground at the base of the
fountain, but with a five-foot-wide fan of floral ‘feathers’. Sandy worked from the back; Dave from the
front. Betty was ordered into service
placing flowers, and I prepped material while keeping the mounting pile of debris
in check.
Meanwhile, people wandered by and many stopped to stare with
a sense of awe at what was being conjured up from sleight-of-hand plus a wealth
of design knowledge. Two teams of landscape
judges were disappointed they couldn’t give our work an award (this was
‘sponsored art’ for a Newport bank and, thus, ineligible).
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| Sandy does a final inspection, including a 'fountain' from leftovers |
After nearly three hours (including several ‘rain delays’),
the peacocks were finished. Although not
in the original design, Dave and Betty used leftover flowers to create a
‘fountain’ from which the first peacock was drinking. The completed vignette was stunning – for
which I take no credit – and free of debris (my proud contribution).
That night at the judges’ dinner, the peacocks were the talk
of the room. Dave and Sandy shared
credit freely, but I think everyone knew who were the artists and who were the
worker bees. Emboldened, though, I asked
the Chair of Judges if she might be able to use an extra set of hands the
following morning when judges assembled to do the work for which they had
traveled from afar. She gave it some
thought and tapped her chin. “You know,”
she said, “we could use another runner.”
But that’s a different story.
