Featured Guests

By CHRIS BOURNEA
Dispatch Media Group

The leader of the free world basked in the beauty of Laura Dowling’s floral arrangements — and now you can, too. Laura Dowling, former chief floral designer of the White House, will appear Feb. 23 during The Columbus Dispatch Home & Garden Show. Dowling will share behind-the-scenes stories from her time as the White House’s chief floral designer and demonstrate tips and techniques for decorating with flowers at home. Dowling also will sign copies of her new book, “Bouquets,” after each presentation and host giveaways of her floral arrangements. In “Bouquets,” which was released Jan. 31 by Stichting Kunstboek, she offers step-by-step tutorials on how to arrange bouquets for all occasions.

Dowling also is the author of “Wreaths,” another collection of how-to guides, and “Floral Diplomacy: At the White House,” which recounts her time as the White House chief floral designer from 2009 to 2015 during the Obama administration. The White House chief floral designer is responsible for the planning, design, arrangement and placement of all floral decorations for the First Family, including official state events and private functions. Dowling said while working at the White House, she called on her training and experience in public policy. She holds a bachelor’s degree in political science and a master’s degree in public policy from the University of Washington and once worked as a legislative assistant to former Senator Slade Gorton. She also worked in communications and fundraising at the Nature Conservancy. During a trip to Paris in 2000, Dowling said she was amazed by the bouquets she saw there, inspiring her to enroll at the city’s L’Ecole des Fleurs to learn the art of flower arranging.

While at the White House, Dowling said, she used flowers to support diplomatic efforts and represent nations’ cultural traditions. During a state dinner for India, for example, she employed the colors of the Indian peacock for the color scheme of the floral table displays. When a delegation from Mexico visited, she created arrangements with colors seen on butterflies that originated in then-Mexican president Felipe Calderon’s hometown of Morelia. “I was a policy analyst before I became a florist,” she said during a TED Talk about her tenure at the White House. “When I was working with flowers, I really saw flowers in a communications and strategic way. In the White House, I took a strategic approach to design, and I really thought flowers could support and contribute to this transformational idea.” Dowling said one occasion in particular drew on her personal experience: She worked with Gold Star families, who have lost loved ones in military service, to design wreaths that the president lays on soldiers’ graves at Arlington Cemetery on Memorial Day. Dowling said she bonded with the Gold Star families, since at age 6, she lost her own father, a decorated U.S. Army helicopter pilot, in Vietnam. “On that day, I saw firsthand, very up close and personal,” she said, “the importance of floral symbolism.”

By JIM FISCHER
Dispatch Media Group

Dr. Lori Verderame still teaches history. She’s just taken her classroom from the college campus to the antique appraisal event circuit. The history professor turned star antiques appraiser will return to central Ohio for shows at this year’s Columbus Dispatch Home & Garden Show presented by Ohio Mulch. Whether you know her from the History Channel’s “The Curse of Oak Island,” Discovery Channel’s “Auction Kings” or her popular YouTube channel, you know she knows her stuff. That means she probably knows about your stuff, too, so be sure to bring that family heirloom or flea market find for her to examine. “People are interested in the stories, whether learning about an object from their family’s past or what makes an object valuable if it’s something they’re planning to sell,” Verderame said by phone from her Pennsylvania home. “Of course, some people are interested in making money and flipping items and doing it with my help. But a lot of people are just interested in how their grandmother might have used something.”

Verderame got informal training from a young age, tagging along with her father to flea markets, yard sales and thrift shops. “I was a young person around all these old people, just soaking up all this historical information,” she said. She went on to earn multiple degrees in history, working in museums and teaching at universities along the way. In the mid-1990’s, she started on what she calls the “antique appraisal comedy tour.” “My background is academic, and having a Ph.D. is obviously a good foundation for what I do now,” she said. “But I had to learn, as a professor, to also be entertaining and educational at the same time.”

Verderame said she’s been fortunate throughout her career to have built a lot of community. She tells the story of meeting a 5-year-old who, along with her grandfather, brought a piece of Western art to one of her shows. Verderame heard from the same person 20 years later and she had built a sizable collection of Western art. At the same time, Verderame celebrates what might seem to be less successful appraisals as well. “I heard from someone who said I told them their old family kitchen table was a piece of junk, but they kept it and tell the story around the table at family gatherings,” she said. In addition to providing appraisals, Verderame said she also talks about things such as how to best price and market items for sale, what kinds of items should never be put in a yard sale and what items need to stay in families. “I’m not a deal-maker,” she said. “I feel it’s important to keep appraisals separate from buying and selling.” In the end, it’s all about her audience. “Of course the objects are still fascinating to me after all these years, but history is about people. The objects are the things that people made and used, and that’s what’s important,” Verderame said. “I love being able to offer that kind of instruction and, along the way, help buyers and sellers make a lot of money.”

By TERESA WOODWARD
Dispatch Media Group

Nick McCullough doesn’t shy away from a landscape design challenge. For the past 15 years, he’s created award-winning designs from a pint-sized prairie garden in German Village to large estate gardens in New Albany. So, when asked to build his national reputation by becoming a featured garden designer at the 2019 Philadelphia Flower Show, he welcomed the challenge. In Philadelphia earlier this spring he was tasked with designing a 2,000-square-foot garden inside a convention center. Even more daunting is the fact that he debuted the project before an audience of 250,000 people.

“It’s the oldest and largest indoor flower show put on since 1829, and to be a part of that legacy is such an honor and something always in my heart,” says McCullough. “I’m a firm believer in making your own luck and if you put yourself out there it will pay off in dividends.” McCullough, 39, a local landscaper with 3 million followers on Pinterest, invited thousands of his Instagram followers behind-the-scenes as he designed and installed the exhibit for the flower show.

His nine-month journey to the Philadelphia show began last summer as he started playing with ideas around the show’s “Flower Power” theme, which celebrates flowers’ impact on everyday lives in concert with the 50th anniversary of the Woodstock music festival. McCullough’s concept for the show clicked after an October road trip to the Cleveland Museum of Art to see Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrors. In Cleveland, McCullough and his family of four stepped into the Japanese artist’s intimate dark, mirrored room with tiny suspended lights to, as the artist says, “lose themselves in the grandeur of the universe.” The experience moved McCullough to build a “Flower Power” sensation of infinite blooms.

“My inspiration was to overwhelm viewers with an explosion of flowers and emotions,” says McCullough. He expanded the concept with a keyhole design giving viewers the perspective of a Woodstock stage overlooking an infinite crowd of perennial flowers multiplied by mirrors set in the corners of the exhibit. He named his design “All Along the Watch Tower,” after the Bob Dylan/Jimmy Hendrix song,  and added six 10-foot towers to mimic Woodstock’s lighting and sound scaffolding.