Skip to content
Link copied to clipboard
Link copied to clipboard

A ‘50-year love affair’ with creating floral art

Wilfreta Baugh exhibited at the Philadelphia Flower Show for many years, and her home is adorned with her many arrangements and creations.
Wilfreta Baugh waters plants in her Elkins Park home. Baugh was a longtime competitor at the Philadelphia Flower Show, and continues to showcase her creativity within her home.Read moreJessica Griffin / Staff Photographer

In 1974, Wilfreta Baugh bought copper tubing at a plumbing supply store. She wasn’t fixing a sink. Instead she artfully positioned the tubing and two bird of paradise blooms against a copper-colored satin background. She would enter the creation in the individual flower arrangements category at that year’s Philadelphia Flower Show.

The first-time competitor won a blue ribbon and “best of show,” for her dramatic creation.

“It was an emotionally charged experience,” said Baugh, a retired physician, and led to a “50-year love affair.”

Baugh would go on to win numerous ribbons at the annual Flower Show, which is sponsored by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society.

She continues to design floral arrangements and teaches others her techniques. In the dining room in her home in Elkins Park, white rectangular containers filled with pink and white roses line a long, oak table. Five sunflowers in a square container decorate a sideboard. Two bright yellow sunflowers by the sink in the kitchen add a pop of color to the gray and white decor.

The blossoms were left over from a workshop Baugh conducted for members of Our Garden Club of Philadelphia and Vicinity. The club was founded in 1939 by African American women who, at the time, were barred from joining other garden clubs because of their race. Baugh, who credits her mother with teaching her to garden, joined the club in 1972.

Growing up in Virginia, the second oldest of seven, Baugh helped her parents, Wilford and Mazie Gourdine, grow vegetables for the family table. Mazie also grew plants from specimens she collected in her travels across the country, Baugh said.

On a cold winter morning, warm sunlight streams into tall windows filled with flourishing plants in Baugh’s century-old, Colonial revival home.

Baugh, whose seamstress mother taught her to sew, made the white cushions for the wicker furniture in her sunroom. Philodendron, succulents, sansevieria, asparagus ferns, and a Christmas cactus heavy with magenta blooms overflow tables and hang from the ceiling.

Baugh combined her passions for plants and clothes-making in creating the flapper costume displayed on a dress form in the dining room. Instead of fabric, she used feathery dried grasses and ferns and twisted vines. When the costume was exhibited at an Our Garden Club flower show, the bodice was adorned with red roses.

She is not the only creative member of her family. The walls of her home are hung with her late sister Ruth Gourdine’s stunning expressionist art.

In the living room, which is furnished with blue velvet sofas and an oriental rug, the glazed ceramic bust of a beautiful woman on a side table is the work of Baugh’s granddaughter Alexa Smith. Baugh says her granddaughter’s art is “reminiscent of my sister’s.”

Baugh, a widow, has a son William, a daughter Gabrielle, seven grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.

She and her late husband, Bill, met when she was visiting a friend in Philadelphia in 1961.

“We dated that summer and were married by October,” she said. Baugh, who was valedictorian of her class at Hampton University, taught math in a Philadelphia elementary school for seven years before going to medical school.

In 1978, she was in her third year at Jefferson Medical School when Bill died of leukemia. Their children were 9 and 14. She soldiered on, graduating from Jefferson, completing a residency in internal medicine at Albert Einstein Medical Center and establishing a medical practice in Germantown.

Despite her hectic schedule, Baugh continued to create floral designs because, she said, “it can have a calming impact on one’s mood and existence.”

In 1993 she bought the stone, three-story home in Elkins Park. There had been a fire and the structure required renovations. Hardwood floors were refinished and the bathrooms and kitchen were updated.

Baugh planted flower beds and landscaped the half-acre lot with shrubs and evergreen trees. She stores materials for her floral projects in the basement and garage.

Though she plans to do so in the future, Baugh will not compete at this year’s Philadelphia Flower Show. She’s too busy as a PHS board member and chair of the Flower Show and Events Committee.

The Philadelphia Flower Show, “Gardens of Tomorrow,” will be held at the Convention Center March 1-9.

Is your house a Haven? Nominate your home by email (and send some digital photographs) at properties@inquirer.com.

Link copied to clipboard
Link copied to clipboard