Lee Easterly
Save the airfare and enjoy Paris in spring at Le Printemps on Wednesday, 2-5 p.m. and Lookout Mountain Club in Fairyland
Ferris Robinson
The Garden Club of Lookout Mountain, member of the Garden Club of American, presents Le Printemps, a GCA flower show. And you are invited!
There is no entry charge, and club members have been working for months in order to transport you out of your winter doldrums into spring. The name of this flower show, Le Printemps, is French for spring, and that title was chosen carefully. Lee Easterly, chair of the show, has coordinated the multitude of working parts necessary for this event, which requires major effort from GCLM members to ensure perfection in everything from name tags and judges’ dinners to awards, staging and photography!
The classes and divisions of entries in Le Printemps are just as complex, including several categories for floral design. “Palatial Petals: Gardens of Versailles Reimagined” calls for floral designers to create an arrangement with inspiration from the painterly colors and textures from the Old Dutch Masters’ paintings. “Silk to Petal: Hermes Scarves” invites members to be inspired by the iconic, timeless elegance of the Hermes scarf, Princess Grace’s favorite accessory. For “Frame” your Blooming Masterpiece, members will create floral masterpieces incorporating frames of their choice, imagining their arrangement displayed next to works by Monet, Matisse, Renoir and Degas.
Thinking of Paris in the spring? Another classification calls for a functional table design that evokes alfresco meals at a café along the Champs-Elysees.
And that’s only for the first division! Le Jardin boasts entries that include propagation, cut specimens and collections, which can be a presentation of cuttings from the exhibitors’ garden or an educational display that showcases the relationships between species and cultivars within a genus or between genera and species and cultivars within a plant family. I promise, although you will be bowled over by the sheer beauty abounding at the Lookout Mountain Club in Fairyland, you will learn plenty. Also in this division is horticulture design, which will recreate French gardens possibly found at Versailles. In this section you will also find beautiful French parfum bottles embellished with dried plant material, possibly inspired by Catherine de Medici, wife of King Henry II, who brought perfumery to the French court. Of course, you know there has to be a category dedicated to Marie Antoinette in Le Printemps. Let Them Eat Cake will entice you with exquisite French pastries or tarts that will make your mouth water. But know it will be created entirely from dried plant material.
Arts Botaniques is one of the more mind-boggling categories to me. Prepare to be duped. Yes, you will want to pick up and try on the jeweled brooch that could pass for a creation by Cartier, Boucheron or Chanel. But each miniature bauble will be creatively made with organic materials!
Indeed, there will be remarkable arrangements of all sizes to wow you, all adhering to strict protocol. For example, unlike the majority of flower shows in the past, the use of floral foam is prohibited in all GCA arrangements. You will learn more at the display showcasing the hazards of floral foam to the environment and options to create gorgeous arrangements with nary a speck of the dreadful foam. The educational focus of Le Printemps is demonstrated in the exhibit “Environmentally Conscious Floral Designs.”
The Garden Club of America is an excellent example of conservation. This nonprofit national organization is composed of 200 garden clubs with almost 18,000 club members who devote energy and expertise to projects in their communities and across the United States. Founded in 1913, the GCA is a leader in horticulture, conservation, creative arts, historic preservation, and environmental protection. The purpose of The Garden Club of America is to stimulate the knowledge and love of gardening, to share the advantages of association by means of educational meetings, conferences, correspondence, and publications, and to restore, improve, and protect the quality of the environment through educational programs and action in the fields of conservation and civic improvement.
Informed volunteers working for a beautiful, healthy planet, these gals also know how to put on a flower show that will knock your socks off.
Come celebrate spring on Wednesday, 2-5 p.m. at the Lookout Mountain Club, 1201 Fleetwood Dr., Lookout Mountain, Ga. There is no charge to attend.
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Ferris Robinson is the author of three children’s books, “The Queen Who Banished Bugs,” “The Queen Who Accidentally Banished Birds,” and “Call Me Arthropod” in her pollinator series “If Bugs Are Banished.” “Making Arrangements” is her first novel and is available in paperback and on Kindle. “Dogs and Love - Stories of Fidelity” is a collection of true tales about man’s best friend. She is the editor of The Lookout Mountain Mirror and The Signal Mountain Mirror.