A Flowered Path Into Wedded Life
Picture it: a lily-and-rose blanketed gazebo perched on a grassy cliff overlooking a pounding turquoise sea.
Now, picture trumpeters in black tie proclaiming the arrival of a bride so majestically turned out that wedding guests suck in their breaths. Her white lace gown glitters with a gold beaded bodice. Her bouquet--a waterfall of bridal white roses, lilies of the valley and Casablanca lilies--sparkles with more gold beads.
As she inches toward the gazebo, her Cinderella pumps never touch the lawn. Why? Because, along with gussying up the Ritz-Carlton gazebo and gold-flecking her bouquet, a florist has stripped 1,000 white roses of their petals to create a path upon which Peggy O’Neil-Milhous will sweep into wedded life with Charles Rohrer.
Sound like something out of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”? Perhaps. But it’s business-as-usual for Paul Ecke. His Black Iris in Laguna Beach is Orange County’s hottest hothouse.
Just last week, Ecke created the floral arrangements that graced the oval table upon which four U.S. Presidents did lunch at the Nixon library. When President Bush, Ronald Reagan, Gerald R. Ford, and Richard M. Nixon and their wives sank their teeth into Dover sole with lemon butter sauce, they did so beside three Ecke bouquets: first, the centerpiece, a spray of yellow roses--a favorite of Pat Nixon’s--interspersed with Sterling Silver roses, Queen Anne’s lace and freesia; and then, two smaller satellite bouquets, floral bookends for the main masterpiece. Ecke also did the library’s entry bouquet. And, he provided the white orchids that glamorized the facility’s four guest bathrooms.
Also last week, Ecke created the birthday bouquet sent to Harriet Nelson by her son, David. It was a spring basket loaded with flowers--lilies, roses, tulips, freesias--and one perfect gardenia, he says. “David’s bouquets to his mother always include one gardenia.”
Ecke also dreams up arrangements for Laguna Beach resident Bette Midler. “She likes them stylized, but not too far out,” Ecke says. Ditto O.J. Simpson.
Elizabeth Taylor likes them romantic. Ecke did arrangements for La Liz when she vacationed last year at the Ritz-Carlton.
Then there are developer-clients like Donald Bren, Donald Koll, David Stein, Barry Brief, and Jim and Al Baldwin. And, on occasion, William Lyon. Ecke has also done the popular Orangewood Ball for Kathryn Thompson. Not to mention the Christmas wreaths that Nixon sends to his good friends, developer Donald Bendetti and his wife, Dorothy.
Or the posies that regularly spruce up the waterfront manse of Western Digital chairman Roger Johnson and his wife, Janice.
There is also the Dallas mega-millionaire whose name Ecke doesn’t want to see in print. (The prominent Texan’s daughter will marry in Orange County this fall. Rumors are flying that the Bushes may attend.)
In a monetary way, things haven’t always come up roses for Ecke, a high-energy guy who disarms you with his Colgate smile.
In 1979, he was an art director for schools in the Irvine and Anaheim areas. He loved his job. But there were those “summers off ,” as he calls them.
He needed odd jobs to make ends meet. “I did some abstract painting,” he says. “But it wasn’t enough.” When a fellow faculty member asked him to create something special, decorate a table for a party at one of the schools--”Come on, you’re an artist--you do great bulletin boards!” he told Ecke--Ecke decided to give it a try. And he ended up doing several more. “I created a look women liked. Then I began doing parties, weddings, benefits. Things really took off.”
Ecke’s floral “look” came at a time when hostesses and brides were getting burned out on traditional arrangements, he says. “They were tired of the same old carnations, roses and mums.” So he gave them drama--exotic concoctions using ginger, anthurium, orchids and angular foliage.
Now, Ecke specializes in the tropical and the traditional. For the recent Milhous-Rohrer nuptials, Ecke not only flooded the gazebo with flowers and topiary trees, he surrounded the towering wedding cake--embellished with edible 24-karat gold--with 14 marbleized pillars topped with explosions of white blooms. He also provided the white liquid-silk coverlets that camouflaged every ballroom and garden chair.
The occasion’s centerpieces stood atop three-foot acrylic pedestals. “The magnitude of the flowers for that wedding just blew my mind,” Ecke says. (Ecke used a grammar school room to accommodate the blooms he ordered for Peggy Milhous. His shop wasn’t big enough.) “It was absolutely the most elegant wedding I have ever seen,” he says.
For Orange County’s ultimate power lunch Thursday at the Nixon library, the trick was to have the roses opened “just enough” when the Presidents sat down to dine, Ecke says. “We made the arrangement on Tuesday to get it to the library on Wednesday because security was so tight we couldn’t go into the library on Thursday,” he says, catching his breath.
“We took the flowers out of the cooler for eight hours to start them opening. Then we put them back to stop them from opening. At the library, they were kept in an air-conditioned room until lunch so they would be absolutely perfect.”
They were. Now that’s flower power.
