Tags
Several weeks ago, I had the pleasure of participating in the San Francisco Garden Club’s annual fundraiser event: Couture et Fleurs. I’ve participated in past Garden Club events, and was honored to help with their biggest event of the year.
The SF Garden Club is non-profit organization that raises money to promote and support horticulture-related projects around the city. They donate tens of thousands of dollars each year to programs such as the San Francisco Botanical Garden, the Alice Eastwood Scholarships at City College of San Francisco, and the Awards of Excellence in Landscape Design at U.C. Berkeley. They support San Francisco’s Friends of the Urban Forest project which promotes the city’s green
infrastructure through community tree planting. They also support the Urban Sprouts project, a garden-based educational program that teaches inner city kids about nutrition, health, and promotes ecoliteracy. The SF Garden Club’s most famous project is support for the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers, which reopened in 2003 after years of restoration.
Held at the Four Season’s Hotel, “Couture et Fleurs” featured a reception, silent auction, runway fashion show, and luncheon. A group of us from CCSF were tasked with creating floral accessories (hats, purses, jewelry) to accompany the daytime, cocktail, and evening designs created by Robert Berry, a local San Francisco fashion designer. It took weeks of planning, hours of coordinating, and two full days of designing in order to complete our accessories….and we were just a small portion of the entire event! In the end, we created twelve floral hats/fascinators, six pieces of floral “jewelry”, three floral purses, a baby’s breath boa, a floral fan, and three full floral outfits. This was a huge departure from the floral designs we do every day.
In the end we were all very pleased with the end results and it could not have been accomplished without the countless hours of hard work by student volunteers and Steven Brown, Chair of the Environmental Horticulture / Floristry program at CCSF. Some of us volunteered as models and participated in the fashion show. It was a great opportunity to break out of our traditional flower design mold and do something unique and different; I hope I can help out again next year! Here are some articles on the event from SF Gate and SF Wire.