A small suburban Louisville florist named Grace Walker who owned one of the town's oldest shops, Kingsley Walker Florist got the job of designing the Derby winner's garland in 1932. She took the job to heart. She promptly took herself to Churchill Downs, took out a measuring tape and sized up a thoroughbred's height and shoulder width. Then then set to work figuring out how to do two things: 1) make sure no horse would ever feel a prick from that garland's wire or a rose's thorns and 2) make sure no rose ever fell off.
Grace cut and designed a garland of plain-weave cotton lined with a soft protective pad and topped with a green background of thick, wide, flat green leaves. She selected 500 matched deep-red roses, broke the stems to the right length, wired each rose individually by pushing the wire into the stem and sewed each to the cotton, by hand. A rose leaf was placed on every other flower and each rose was sewn three times, using green button-hole thread. The finished product measured 14 inches wide and 2 1/2 yards long. Every wire in the wreath was protectively covered with floral tape.
After the first year, Walker came up with the ingenious idea of rigging a wrought iron frame .. similar to those used for quilting .. for just this one task. Her six employees, her daughter and her granddaughters eventually all pitched in.
In the 1930s, the rose Walker preferred was named Happiness. But Happiness didn't last. Never did American Beauty or Forever Yours. She told Sports Illustrated in 1986 that every five or six years she had to change the strain of rose she used because the strain tended to lost its umph and go purple, then pink. Not on her garland!
Walker always ordered flowers in January from her hand-picked Indiana grower, who delivered matched roses early on Derby Eve. Work started around 2 p.m. and ended around midnight. Their work was displayed at the shop until around noon, then ceremoniously trucked to the Downs.
Walker made sure the five or six dozen roses for the jockey's bouquet also matched his horse's garland .. she hated the use of any other term for the things she created .. and trimmed it in 10 yards of silk ribbon.
The most she ever charged Churchill Downs was $3,600 and that included flowers, labor and delivery for the garland, bouquet and every single one of those tall vases of roses in the Winner's Circle, too.
The final year for the Derby garland of roses made by Kingsley Walker Florist was in 1986.
Thank you, Ms. Grace for the 50 plus years of dedication you and Kingsley Walker Florist gave to the Kentucky Derby.
Pat Locke, Maestro Muse
