Designing for a Crowd

Whether you have four or four hundred to your table for a celebration, I think there is nothing as beautiful - or necessary - as flowers for your centerpieces. Of course, you may say I am biased, but believe me when I say that flowers make the visual design of your table come alive more than any other element, whether your space is large or small.

So last week, when I created the flower arrangements at Waynesborough Country Club, I had this concept in mind - how could I make the greatest impact in this huge space? There was a 40-foot table set up for the main buffet, three other huge buffets scattered around the rooms, and 35 tiny vases. In addition, they asked me to use a cornucopia for the main centerpiece.

Designing on a large scale can be fun, and I wanted to create a variety of harvest-themed arrangements for the members to enjoy as they celebrated Thanksgiving. When one designs big, the challenge is to create a visual impact both from far away and up close - it sounds simple, but it's not. Too much material or color can look junky and messy from far away, and too little has no interest up close. I also had to design 'in the round' - the main piece would been seen from all sides.

So I chose a few colors - reds, purples, greens, and hints of oranges and yellows for a good, far-away impact - and used gilded fruits, branches, berries, vegetables, pods, moss, and gilded wheat to create the detail and delight up-close.

For flowers, I used purple stocks, bells of Ireland, solidaster, Freedom roses, Milva roses, yellow lilies, orange lilies, white, orange, and yellow snapdragon, trick dianthus, and green cymbidium orchids. It was a fun event to work on, and I loved the chance to create a variety of looks within a single theme. Enjoy!

Main buffet -

To give you a sense of the space in which I was working -

A collar of gilded wheat for the cornucopia -

A side view of the buffet -

A rear view -

The other side view -

One of the three additional buffet pieces - lots of pods and branches -

Green apples always look so fresh -

A shot of one of the vases for the tables -