Quite a Crafty Character

If crafts are up your alley, Lady Hilda von Wimbleshot has a bowling ball for you.

In preparation for a series of how-to crafts seminars at Fern’s Garden store in Los Alamitos, the resourceful Wimbleshot, a spoof of the serious English gardener, created by actress Elise Dewsberry, has gotten her hands on some bowling balls that have seen better days.

Under her watchful eye, students will learn how to transform the spheres--using bits of polished glass and stone--into resplendent mosaic gazing balls for their gardens.

“Gazing balls are all the rage now,” Lady Hilda says in the arch tones of a polished Brit who has just crossed the pond.

The idea of presenting Dewsberry’s seminars in character came from Fern Solomon, owner of Fern’s Garden with her husband, Sam. The shop sells items such as garden stakes with whimsical motifs and melodic wind chimes.

While national vendors such as Smith & Hawken have helped turn the garden accessory business into a multimillion-dollar industry, it has become imperative for smaller stores to find unusual ways to market their products.

“Anybody can sell a birdbath or a piece of outdoor furniture,” says Bruce Butterfield, research director for the National Gardening Assn. in Burlington, Vt. “The successful ones develop their own style.”

Having a theatrical character teach seminars is a marketing technique that is right up there with “Martha Stewart creating a following of wannabes,” Butterfield says. “It’s retail as entertainment, a way to help people discover that they too can do things they hadn’t thought about doing.”

Dreaming up a new character fanned the imagination of the creative Dewsberry, who, two years ago, moved to California from Canada, where she had been touring in the one-woman musical comedy “Nine Months.”

First, she came up with the name, then, piece by piece, she began to assemble Lady Hilda’s persona: flower-bedecked straw hat, carrot-colored wig, Chiclets-size front teeth, floral print dress, tennies and a string of pearls.

“It just made sense that Elise should use all her years of study [in drama] and experience to teach,” Fern Solomon says of Dewsberry, who is also the assistant manager of thestore.

The seminars (not all are bowling-ball-related--poetry stones and wreaths of succulents get their day in the sun too) are offered on a rotating schedule. The staff at Fern’s Garden has enclosed a small, sheltered area on a parking lot and equipped it with a 30-foot-long crafts table and umbrella-shaded benches.

But, to hear Lady Hilda tell it, this is an outdoor classroom situated in a warehouse district far from the “family estate in Shropshire” where she “personally tends 20,000 acres of gardens.”

And, for those who have any trouble imagining that setting, there is some positive reinforcement: Lady Hilda’s freshly brewed English tea and home-baked scones with strawberry jam, genuine articles served in high style.

The seminars cost about $45, which includes instruction, materials--and antics by Lady Hilda.