Festive Finds
Jennifer Convy is shopping for holiday decorations, and her first stop is the L.A. Flower District. “This is a resource lots of people don’t think about, but I always start any decorating project here. The flower market and an art sup ply store can fill a lot of needs.”
She is zipping along the 700 block of Wall Street, where more than 100 vendors meld into the bustling hub of downtown L.A.’s flower distribution, which includes the Southern California Flower Market. Convy’s home decorations are not going to be plastic snowmen or ready-made sleighs and reindeer.
“I’m into natural stuff,” she explains.
She’s also into budget stuff, which seems to fit the general consumer mood. According to a survey by Department 56, a manufacturer of holiday collectibles and trim, Americans spend an average of $60 a year on holiday decorating and don’t want it to increase.
“There’s no point on spending more money on plastic Santas than on gifts,” says Convy. As the host of HGTV’s “Awesome Interiors,” she has just wrapped up her sixth season presenting creative ways people have found to decorate on a budget. It’s her premise that you “don’t need a million dollars to have a house that looks like a million bucks.” Stores such as Ikea, Home Depot and Pier 1 Imports offer a treasury of redecorating help, she notes. “Pottery Barn is even offering books on how to sponge and rag walls, or how to patina furniture.”
So when December comes, she makes her annual budget-minded trip to the wholesale flower district. Today she is shopping specifically for wreath material and maybe a centerpiece or two.
And although her shopping list does include traces of polystyrene and a few other chemically induced ingredients, for the most part it would pass eco-muster with such groups as the Environmental Defense Fund. The group’s guidelines this year for a green Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa include pleas for live trees that can be replanted; natural decorations, including cranberry strings; and recycled greeting cards.
For Convy, natural products have no season. “For Thanksgiving, I made a centerpiece of lemons and lemon leaves clipped right off the tree, with gourds and beautiful rust ribbon wound around candelabra. The oranges and yellows looked gorgeous.”
Convy has had a whirlwind career. She’s also the host for “Inntimate Escapes” on the Discovery Channel, for which she has traveled the world during the last 18 months. Daughter of the late actor Bert Convy and his producer wife, Anne, she grew up in the world of theater and TV studios. After receiving a degree in theater arts from Arizona State University, she studied in New York with acting coach Stella Adler before returning to Los Angeles to begin her television career. “I’ve always had a knack for design,” she says.
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And for the holiday season, she has learned that a little ingenuity can go a long way. She likes the strings of 100 tiny white lights for $3.99 that can be used to outline a staircase banister, doors and windows, or bushes. “Lights are so wonderful now--they even make nets of lighting you can just drop over a bush.” (Home decorators need to keep in mind that lights come in indoor and outdoor varieties.)
Garlands of greenery are equally versatile, and, in addition to pine, cedar and spruce, sprigs of holly and ivy are especially festive. Dried flowers come in a treasury of moss, pods, magnolia branches, ferns, holly, gold dust wreaths and other exotic trim. Ornamental dried seeds can be purchased in bags, garlands or balls.
Bunches of raffia and blocks of jewel-tone ribbon excelsior have a thousand decorative uses. And glue gun, glue sticks and green lightweight florist wire are among Convy’s basic work tools.
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All this and much, much more await the Wall Street shopper. “Every city has a flower mart, but this one is particularly good,” says Convy, threading her way through a crush of carts and customers. Although it is midmorning, which is almost closing time for the mart (the professionals, such as floral shop owners, start arriving at dawn for the best of the day’s shipments from around the world), the aisles are still clogged with shoppers preparing for the holidays.
Mellano & Co. is the first stop. “Customize your Christmas with fresh wreaths, garlands and centerpiece swags made here daily,” says the large red banner over the entrance. It’s one of many vendors carrying greenery for wreaths. This includes prepackaged pine, fir and incense cedar; pine cones by the bag; and poinsettias of every size. Convy selects branches of red winter berries and garlands of pink dried berries that look like tiny apples.
Then she heads to Biaggi’s, a few doors down the street, where wreaths of every size and girth line the walls, the shelves and the floors. Although she loves the fragrance of eucalyptus wreaths, Convy is looking for a large skeletal twig base and chooses one in manzanita, which is dropped on the floor with a thump, to shake off all the loose stems. This will be converted to a dramatic natural chandelier, glowing with tiny lights.
For a smaller, green wreath, she has her choice of fir, pine or cedar, from an 8-inch to a 28-inch ring. She settles on a 14-inch pine wreath.
A major stop in the district is Moskatel’s art supply store, an emporium of supplies ranging from $1.99 glue guns to a 9-foot artificial pine tree ($249.99) so majestic it seems straight from the forest. Anything that is real also comes in fake versions now, notes Convy, and is much more convincing than in the old days. “And the advantage is you can take them out and reuse them every year.”
The sprawling store looks like a winter wonderland, with its forests of artificial trees, bins of grapevine wreaths, huge bags of potpourri nestled in red excelsior, topiary bases in dozens of shapes and sizes, barrels of pine cones and floppy tree-top bows in gold satin.
With a shopping basket on her arm, Convy locates ribbons, lights, a flat basket, a can of gold spray and Styrofoam balls. “These are good because you can either glue sequins on or push pins in,” she says.
Pushing pins and gluing sequins are basic steps in making many decorations. By the next day, Convy will have produced one manzanita chandelier wreath, one decorated pine wreath and a gold ball centerpiece. She says anyone can make decorations.
“It’s just the greatest thing for the holidays,” she says, “and it’s something the kids can help with--a real family project. And it’s a nice accessory for the home any time of the year.”
Southern California Flower Market hours for the public: 8 a.m. to noon Monday, Wednesday and Friday; 6 a.m. to noon Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Closed Sundays. Admission: weekdays, $2 per adult, 16 and older. Saturdays, $1 per adult. For information, call (213) 627-2482.
