Strategies For Making The Best

Floral Arrangement Within A Budget

WOODBURY — For decades, as special events manager at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Chris Giftos set tables for dignitaries ranging from Prince Charles and Princess Diana to Henry Kissinger, Madonna, Bill Clinton, and Jacqueline Onassis. He also designed the towering flower arrangements in the museum’s Great Hall.

On May 13, the artist will share his secrets at a benefit lecture-demonstration at Woodbury Town Hall that will kick off the 80th anniversary celebration at Glebe House Museum & The Gertrude Jekyll Garden, an 18th Century house museum in Connecticut’s scenic Litchfield Hills.

On May 14, a plant sale will be held to raise funds for the maintenance of the garden, the site of the only extant American garden planned by England’s celebrated landscape designer, widely considered the greatest gardener of the 20th Century. The plant sale will feature annuals and perennials such as those that Miss Jekyll would have used.

Mr Giftos will lecture and demonstrate his technique for creating remarkable flower arrangements. He will also discuss the strategies he used to make the most impact for his budget. As he speaks, he will create several arrangements. At the conclusion of the lecture, these will be auctioned to attendees.

Mr Giftos began working with flowers as a boy of 13, when he got a job at a neighborhood flower shop. After serving in the Army, attending college, and then working briefly at an insurance company, he decided to make flowers his career.

His first job at a Manhattan flower shop and his examinations of the stylish bouquets displayed around town by the city’s floral trendsetters eventually led to a position at the fashionable Christatos & Koster, doing flowers for the stylish parties of the city’s rich and super-rich. After one Metropolitan Museum of Art event for which he created dozens of centerpieces, he asked his museum contacts for a job doing such projects full time.

After a bequest from Reader’s Digest co-founder Lila Acheson Wallace, which allocated funds for fresh flowers for the Great Hall, Mr Giftos started at the Met in 1970. Subsequently, for more than three decades, he filled the urns in the four niches in the museum’s Great Hall every week and planned hundreds of lavish benefits, galas, and other events, involving cocktails or sit-down dinners for hundreds, from the wines, the menus and the security right down to the placecards.

Heirloom and unusual plants such as those found in the Jekyll garden will make up the bulk of the plants on sale on the Glebe House grounds during Garden Day. Along with iris and peonies, visitors can expect to find old-fashioned favorites such as foxglove, hellebore, lamb’s ear, lungwort, and the unusual bergenia, with an oval dark-green leaf and a slender pink flower spike.

The Glebe House Museum will be open to visitors all weekend from 1 to 4 on Saturday and Sunday. Offering a glimpse of life in Revolutionary War-era Connecticut, the circa 1760 clapboard house is furnished as it would have been when it was the home of the Reverend John Rutgers Marshall, an Anglican cleric; his wife, Sarah; and their nine children and three slaves, who moved here in 1771.

The Giftos lecture will take place in at Woodbury Town Hall on Main Street (Route 6), at 7 pm on Friday, May 13, with wine and hors d’oeuvres at 6. The admission of $80 reserves a seat and represents the 80 years of the museum’s existence; $50 of the admission is tax-deductible. 

The plant sale takes place at the museum the next day between 10 am and 4 pm. Admission to the plant sale is free.

Proceeds from the lecture and Garden Day activities will benefit the Glebe House Museum & The Gertrude Jekyll Garden, a non-profit educational institution that seeks to make itself available to everyone as a unique historical, religious and cultural landmark.

For lecture tickets or further information, contact the museum at 203-263-2855 or online at www.TheGlebeHouse.org.