Long-time bbrooks member Avant Garden, in Dallas, TX surely knows how to dress their plants with style and flair!

Shown at left are multiple spikes of White Phalaenopsis orchids arranged naturally in clear glass with river stones.

Sean McGowan of bbrooks member Modern Floristry in Los Angeles is a featured stylist of Kitchen of the Month in the March 2013 issue of House Beautiful.

The Salt Lake City native has been a floral and garden designer in Los Angeles for the past two decades.  He shares, “Flowers are usually just seen as the icing on the cake, but I think they’re so much more than that!”

Town & Country magazine, Spring issue, artfully uses florals to highlight the spring fashion lines of noted designers such as Christian Dior, Carolina Herrera, Oscar de la Renta, Ralph Lauren, Chanel, Moschino, Dolce & Gabbana, and Donna Karan.

Seen at left is Donna Karan New York gown ($6,800); Sophie McElligott headband (price on request); Tom Binns necklace ($1,315); Erickson Beamon earrings ($54); Chanel rings (prices on request); Kim Lone umbrella (price on request).

Father’s Day is a celebration honoring fathers and celebrating fatherhood, paternal bonds, and the influence of fathers in society. Many countries celebrate it on the third Sunday of June, but it is also celebrated widely on other days. Father’s Day was created to complement Mother’s Day, a celebration that honors mothers and motherhood.

On July 5, 1908, a West Virginia church sponsored the nation’s first event explicitly in honor of fathers, a Sunday sermon in memory of the 362 men who had perished in the previous December’s explosions at the Fairmont Coal Company mines in Monongah. The next year, a Spokane, Washington woman named Sonora Smart Dodd, one of six children raised by a widower, tried to establish an official equivalent to Mother’s Day for male parents. She was successful: Washington State celebrated the nation’s first statewide Father’s Day on July 19, 1910.

In 1916, President Wilson honored the day by using telegraph signals to unfurl a flag in Spokane when he pressed a button in Washington, D.C. In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge urged state governments to observe Father’s Day. However, many men continued to disdain the day. As one historian writes, they “scoffed at the holiday’s sentimental attempts to domesticate manliness with flowers and gift-giving, or they derided the proliferation of such holidays as a commercial gimmick to sell more products–often paid for by the father himself.”

During the 1920s and 1930s, a movement arose to scrap Mother’s Day and Father’s Day altogether in favor of a single holiday, Parents’ Day. Every year on Mother’s Day, pro-Parents’ Day groups rallied in New York City’s Central Park–a public reminder, said Parents’ Day activist and radio performer Robert Spere, “that both parents should be loved and respected together.” Paradoxically, however, the Depression derailed this effort to combine and de-commercialize the holidays. Struggling retailers and advertisers redoubled their efforts to make Father’s Day a “second Christmas” for men, promoting goods such as neckties, hats, socks, pipes and tobacco, golf clubs and other sporting goods, and greeting cards. When World War II began, advertisers began to argue that celebrating Father’s Day was a way to honor American troops and support the war effort. By the end of the war, Father’s Day may not have been a federal holiday, but it was a national institution.

In 1972, in the middle of a hard-fought presidential re-election campaign, Richard Nixon signed a proclamation making Father’s Day a federal holiday at last. Today, economists estimate that Americans spend more than $1 billion each year on Father’s Day gifts.

For information on Succulent Wall shown above, please go to www.floragrubb.com

Member Bay Hill Florist in Orlando, FL  posted a link  to www.bridebird.com.  Currently featured is this unique and beautiful bridal bouquet of succulents, orchids, leucadendrons, dahlias and seeded eucalyptus.