Customer Reviews

Flowers, White House Style: With 100 Original Designs by the Former White House Chief Floral Decorator

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

What a lovely book! It is a nice mix of flower arrangements and tips, photos of arrangements in the White House in recent times, and historical survey of flowers and their importance in the President's house. It is interesting to see the floral styles of each first lady. Those women actually exerted a strong hand in the "look" of the florals for their home on Pennsylvania Ave.

What a contrast of the Johnson girl's wedding with that of the Nixon daughter! Wow, talk about different styles, and they were not all that far apart in time!

There are beautiful watercolor illustrations as lead in to each chapter. They seem to be uncredited--at least, I would not find the artist's name after looking carefully. Like any other book these days, there are small factual errors. Tricia Nixon is referred to as the Nixon's youngest daughter (she is their eldest) and Allium Gigantium is called "tropical" (gee, it grows in my midwest garden surviving all winters.)

But those are small quibbles. Really, this is a lovely book and I enjoyed it!

I loved this book and even though I am not interested in learning how to arrange "stems" - this book is beautiful to look at and very interesting to read!
Very few folks get to have the job Dottie had and her insights and stories are super!
If you love the White House and it's history...add this book to your library! If you want to learn how to put together some of those famous White House arrangements - this book will show you how!
Much more than a "how to" book...filled with backstage stories and interesting info!
Thanks Dottie!

I must admit, I was taken by the title of this book. White House flowers! As an obsessed, award-winning flower grower and arranger, I couldn't wait to get my hands on this book and thought the other negative review was just sour grapes.

Oh dear, was I wrong. The White House Florist and her "co-author" actually hired someone else to write the book and staged many of the arrangements with new flowers in non-White House locales. The editor obviously (a) is not a flower person and/or (b) lost interest in the project a long time ago.

How do we know this? Countless captions misidentify or don't adequately identify the flowers in an arrangement. The "how to" sections are glaringly bad. In one instance, the instructions call for only Gerberas, but the accompanying photo shows a bouquet of roses and Gerberas.

In another "how to", 36 red and pink tulips are called for. Does this mean 36 red and 36 pink? Or 36 tulips that are variegated red and pink? We'll never know, because we stopped reading these sections.

It is errors and omissions such as these that take all pleasure out of the book and keep the reader shaking her head, wondering what else is totally wrong or marginally correct.

Acknowledging that tastes and decor do change over time, some of the arrangements look like they came out of an old FTD catalog. Trite and unimaginative. The very limited flower palette screams AMATEUR.

A note to the book designer: the photoshopped, stylized flower photos that open each chapter and are spread throughout are awful. They look like either a bad photo or a low res image blown up too much. What a disappointment. Some of the photography done especially for the book is lacking in resolution - images are fuzzy. Bad photos, poor print quality, or both?

It appears that this book is just another example of a White House ex-employee trying to profit from the cache of the job. Too bad, it could have been a fantastic book and inspired us for years to come.

This book is so bad I won't even pass it along to someone else.

We can only hope that the current White House florist, who has REAL talent and imagination, will write a better book when it's her turn.

from the Elfin Forest Flower Lady

I find this book to be extremely helpful in showing arrangements and how to make them. I am currently in the Floral Design Industry and this is a main stay in my library.

Unless you are an extemely avid flower collector, I can honestly say that this book would be a waste of anyone's money. I personally cannot think of a more trite, soulless, and uninspiring topic. An individual might find this book somewhat entertaining for the first five minutes, but then you start to see the redundancy and transparency of the floral layouts.

I would much rather buy a book the focuses on floral arrangements across the country, designed and cultivated by regular people. I don't like viewing or reading about floral designed created by people with who's concepts lacked all sense of ingenuity and charm. An unlimited budget and lack of motivation paved the way for these gaudy and self-serving floral arrangements.

For anyone interested in White House history, this book is a must! I have enjoyed reading it over and over.