Photos and Finery at Cheekwood: Former White House Florister Laura Dowling in Nashville
People often talk about moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, but my visit to Cheekwood worked the other way around. Driving down Page Road toward the great mansion and grounds, I saw a yard filled with blow-up characters. A giant Santa had fallen over, partially, but since air was still pulsing, it looked as if he were doing modified push-ups. A few yards later, right out front, there was a blow-up outhouse with a smaller Santa coming out the open door. The whimsy was a welcome addition to the holiday season.
Touring the Cheekwood mansion represented a more elegant aspect of the holidays. Laura Dowling, former head floral designer for the Obama White House, marshalled a score of local volunteers to decorate the second-floor rooms at Cheekwood. With her decades-long study of French floristry—the art of floral design and presentation—she and her acolytes did Nashville proud.
My sister, Sharon Kendall Roberson, and my niece Vivian Syroyezhkin, a writer, accompanied me on this holiday trek. Many know Sharon locally as CEO of the YWCA Weaver Center, the largest shelter for victims of domestic violence in Tennessee. Neither my sister nor Dowling knows the other, but the similarities are uncanny.
Like Dowling, Sharon, a graduate of Vanderbilt Law School, has been a major executive figure in a large non-profit aiding society. Also, like Dowling, Sharon has had a longstanding love of creative elegance in décor for home, hearth, and holiday events. Her self-taught expertise in floristry and design inherited, as with Dowling, in part from an artistic mother, was invaluable to my neophyte’s understanding of the nature and artistic trends found in some of the gorgeous displays created by Dowling and her staff of volunteers.
Three featured rooms on the second floor were representative of Dowling’s work as seen in the White House and elsewhere. That floor was reached by a decorated stairway whose gold- and bronze-tinted berries and leaves beautifully complemented the mansion’s cascading linear chandelier.
The Dining Room, designated “Fanciful Garden” was a sumptuous dinner presentation replete with ornate china place settings, a lush floral centerpiece, and lush bouquets on the sideboard, with wreaths, trees, and mantlepiece trimmings, all in delicate shades of cream, lavender, and green. This was the epitome of French floristry style.
The Morning Room was, in many ways, an exhibit like the best children’s books, fascinating aspects for the inexperienced, deeper understanding for the knowledgeable. Four trees, all in snowy shades of pearl, silver, and gold, subtly accented with clusters of red berries, surrounded the main tree. These four were each sprinkled with twinkling lights whose illumination was caught by the metallic balls and glittery transparent crystals on the central “untwinkled” tree, giving what my sister identified as a falling “snowflake effect.” In another practical technique with artistic results, the surrounding trees were raised onto boxes to better display the embroidered trim of the tree skirts.
The Loggia, enclosed by framed glass doors, included three slender trees, one with bright balls of widely varied sizes in tones and shades of orange. This use of bold colors is seen as particularly American among international floristers. And as part of Dowling’s signature of natural, less formal elements, delicate tendrils of branches, leaves, and berries peeked out here and there.
One other signature of Dowling’s imaginative approach to her art is the topic of one of her four books, Wreaths: With How-To Tutorials. But this was not the traditional round wreath hightlighting Christmas colors of green and red or cinnamon shades of autumn, but instead, a square wreath in what would be cheery shades of yellow were it not so strikingly large.
While the grandeur and artistry of the exhibits matched the grandeur of the mansion, I could have wished for a bit of lightheartedness, not Santa in the outhouse style, but a bit of whimsy to temper the opulent stateliness in each of the mansion’s spaces, but that is the merest of quibbles. The exhibit, open until January 5, 2025, is a wonderful exemplar of what we often Southerners call, “a gracious plenty.”
Two more things: for a more detailed conversation on Dowling’s philosophy and practice of the floral art, see the MCR Interview on YouTube. Also, while at Cheekwood, don’t miss the photo exhibit of Christmas décor at the White House from first ladies Jacqueline Kennedy through Michelle Obama. The pictures of Big Bird with Pat Nixon, Aretha Franklin with Barbara Bush, and Mr. T in a sleeveless Santa suit with Nancy Reagan are particularly entertaining. Plenty of whimsy there.
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Y Kendall is a Stanford-educated musicologist, specializing in dance history who recently earned an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Columbia University, studying nonfiction writing with Ben Ratliff and Margo Jefferson. Kendall’s diverse works have been published in Alchemy: Journal of Translation, Columbia Journal, Mitos Magazín, The Hunger Mountain Review, and The Salt Collective, among others. Born and raised in Tennessee, Kendall now lives near Nashville, freelancing as a flutist and writer, while caregiving for relatives.
