The Town and Country Garden Club met October 15th at breathtaking Stonewall Ridge Farm, home of club member Nancy Fayard. The hostesses were Nancy Fayard, Rebecca Parker and Carroll O‘Brien. Lunch consisted of poppy seed chicken, a tossed salad and muffins provided by Riverbend Country Club.
Educational trivia was presented by Rebecca Parker. She informed the group about the rutabaga plant, which is a cross between a turnip and a wild cabbage. October’s arrangement was “Nature’s Beauty Fruit and Flowers,” and the specimen was chrysanthemums. The program was presented by Amy Montgomery, owner of Amy Montgomery Home in Columbia and Gaslamp 2 in Nashville.
Ms. Montgomery did design work in homes for 30 yrs. Her first job was decorating Waylon Jenning’s office in Nashville. She loved small scale designing the most, and it led into providing live flower arrangements for client’s parties. She will close her store in Columbia in the next few months to focus full time on providing “dinner and flower” event dinners in her Nashville Home. During these dinners she discusses the topics of food, table settings, flowers and other related topics. She noted that one group of about 13 women come from Texas frequently to participate in these event dinners.
Some hostessing tips she gave during the program were to always set your napkin and silverware in traditional positions so that guests don’t have to make the effort to rearrange them. She also recommended having wine and a snack for guests to enjoy while the hostess is completing the meal.
Ms. Montgomery spoke about her weekly Instagram presentation called “Flower Fridays,” where she discusses different aspects of using flowers. She also demonstrated how to make arrangements for the table by creating two of them and giving lots of tips on how to do so successfully. For example, she demonstrated how to cut the center out of carnations to make it appear like a different flower. She also revealed that the way to keep flower arrangements looking their best for up to four weeks was to add fresh water every day and always put the arrangement in the refrigerator at night. After the completion of the beautiful fall arrangements, she auctioned them off to members of the Garden Club. Linda Anderton and Carrol O’Brien were the highest bidders and got to take the beautiful arrangements home. The money bid was used for charity contributions.