The Most Powerful Garden Club in America Continues to Bring Rare Beauty — and Powerful Speakers — to Dallas

It’s always a treat when you can spend a morning listening to people you truly respect, people you know will be witty and share wisdom. That was the case at the recent A Writer’s Garden Symposium and Luncheon.

This annual Dallas event, now celebrating its lucky 13th anniversary, benefits the Women’s Council of the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden. This year’s fundraiser was led by Writer’s Garden chairperson Nikki Beneke, honorary chairperson Carmen Hancock and WCDABG president Venise Stuart.

For more than 20 years, the major goal of the Women’s Council has been the design, construction, funding, and endowment of A Woman’s Garden at The Dallas Arboretum. Phase I opened in September 1997 and Phase II in March 2006. Financial support for A Woman’s Garden comes from fundraising events such as the annual Writer’s Garden Symposium and Luncheon, which has brought to fruition the dream of a magnificent garden — a garden dedicated to all women.

The symposium’s emcee this year was the brilliant, insightful and quick-witted Skip Hollandsworth, a New York Times bestselling author, journalist, screenwriter and executive editor of Texas Monthly magazine. From the podium, Hollandsworth shared some sad numbers: “As you no doubt know, garden clubs are disappearing in this country. Membership in the National Garden Clubs of America has dropped from 650,000 women in 1959 to 150,000 today.

“Flower shows and home garden tours are relics of the past.”

But then Hollandsworth went on to applaud the packed crowd by declaring, “And yet here you are, the most powerful women’s garden club in America — so powerful that you don’t even call yourself a garden club. You call yourself the Women’s Council as if you are some political body running the entire city of Dallas.”

From there, Hollandsworth went on to introduce one of the stars of the morning, interior design legend Bunny Williams. I’ve long been a fan of Williams. In fact, one of PaperCity‘s past Bomb girls, the endlessly chic Cathy Kincaid, a designer herself with a loyal following, got me a copy of her most recent book and had Williams sign it: “You’re the Bomb Billy Fong.”

A self-professed lover of dogs, gardens and china, Williams has had a career spanning close to five decades. She was there that day to share stories and insights particularly from that aforementioned book, Love Affairs with Houses, The gorgeous tome details 15 houses with tales of each “affair,” as she calls them, tracing the style of the spaces, what drew her to the projects and her approach to décor that evolves with the lives of her clients.

One of my favorite memories Williams shared was from a client who was adamantly against putting up a wall that might distract from a water view from their home. The designer had advised that the space needed to be broken up more and that a more pronounced entryway was needed. After living there for several months, the client called Williams back to say “We are going out of town for six months. You were right, put up that wall.” She felt vindicated.

Williams was quick to share many design ideas with her capt audience. One was “it’s all about scale. If you find a screen perhaps open it and hang it on a wall.” The designer also proclaimed not to be fearful of mixing modern furnishings with antiques. She finished her time at the podium by sharing her love of gardens.

“I spend most of my weekends in my garden,” Williams said. “When you see a passionflower open, you just have to stand and stare for a while.” Williams went on to note, “I’ve been gardening for about 35 years. I’ve learned it little by little and have gone on every garden tour I possibly could.”

Southern Women

Before adjourning for lunch, the morning symposium ended with Rebecca Wesson Darwin, co-founder and CEO of the Allée Group LLC, which owns Garden & Gun magazine. Darwin shared that after relocating to Charleston, South Carolina following a successful career in publishing in New York City with stints at GQ, the New Yorker and Mirabella, she and the new magazine’s co-founder realized there was a need for a publication that spoke to the soul of the South and thus they launched Garden & Gun in 2007. Having grown up in Columbia, South Carolina and gone to college at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she knew the Southern lifestyle and vernacular oh-so-well.

Garden & Gun just published a new book, Southern Women, which Darwin was sharing snippets from for the Dallas crowd. It’s an enthralling collection of Southern women’s stories, from icons such as Sissy Spacek and Loretta Lynn to women who might have been overlooked in the past like pioneering Texas rancher Minnie Lou Bradley to the Gee’s Bend, Alabama quilter Mary Margaret Pettway. A video of some of those participating in the book was shown and I relished in the comment made by Nathalie Dupree, a Southern culinary force of nature who has published more than 15 cookbooks.

“If one pork chop is in a pan, it goes dry,” Dupree said. “If two or more are in a pan, the fat from one feeds the other. So there’s always room to move over for another woman.”

The gregarious gardening crowd at the Arboretum that day included Trammell Hancock, Carmen Hancock, Robin Carreker, Dyann Skelton, Linday Kenney, Susan Fisk, Cathey Humphreys, and Tricia Wortley