Orton Garden Open House

Here at Vivienne Tiger, we strongly believe in Continuing Professional Development (CPD) and are always looking for ways of doing things differently, to keep up with new trends, to maintain, improve and broaden our knowledge and skills and develop the personal qualities required in our professional lives.

In February 2010, I had the pleasure to attend a 5 day Event Design Workshop in Wilmington North Carolina with another Event planner Ify Oti from Hannah Michael. The wonderful Jennifer Sandy Rose of Salt Harbor Design ran the workshop.

The experience was mind blowing. We met a lot of amazing people all willing to help and show us new ways of doing things. We were given an opportunity to fully participate in the design and brainstorming for the Orton Garden Open House and see the design implemented.

Orton Gardens is a historic landscape designed around the 1735 mansion and colonial rice fields overlooking the Cape Fear River. It contains 20 acres of lawns and formal gardens, as well as 60 acres of fountains, statues, forests, lagoons, old rice fields, and a family cemetery. The garden features tree-lined brick paths and rows of camellias, dogwoods, magnolias, crape-myrtles, annuals, and perennials. The front gates of the property are topped with cement eagles which lead to a dirt path driveway lined with large oak trees draped in Spanish moss that were planted in the 1700s.

Before the actual workshop in Wilmington, we worked together via emails and the internet to develop a design for the Orton Garden Open House. We worked and agreed on a storyboard and created a computerized layout of the ceremony and reception spaces.

When we arrived in Wilmington for the actual workshop, we helped to choose the paper design, colours, flowers and lighting that worked best with our chosen design. I thoroughly enjoyed preparing the flowers and flower arrangements, working on menu cards and escort cards used in the final design.

It was delightful seeing another Event planner at work and I picked up a lot of new management and planning skills. The setting up of the Orton site was very exciting. The weather was lovely and definitely not as cold as England. As always, it was a joy to see all the months of design and planning coming together. We had the opportunity to talk to many other Event professionals from other Event Planners, caterers, photographers, to bakers and bartenders. Millie Holloman of Millie Holloman Photography and her staff took loads of lovely photographs.

5 days went so fast and I came back armed with a lot of knowledge and my creative juices flowing with different ways of providing a design and planning service that is distinct, for my existing and future clients.