Wilson puts the bloom on 2015 Rose Ball

While the real eye-catchers at the 2015 Rose Ball will likely be the floral arrangements, the face of the event is Wendy Wilson.

As decorations committee chair for the ball, to be held Sept. 18 at the Poinsett Club, Wilson is the one making sure those 4,000 roses are in place and dazzling as guests walk through the door.

The decorations are “the huge part” of the Rose Ball, said Beth Nukolls, who chaired the previous event.

“I feel like the decorations are a bigger job than the chair, in some ways,” she said, “because they are the ones who make it, as it is referred to, ‘the most wonderful ball of them all,’” Nukolls said.

The Rose Ball, held biennially, is known as “Greenville’s longest-running charitable community event.”

Fifty percent of the proceeds from the ball will benefit Bon Secours St. Francis Hospital. The remainder will be disbursed among other charities in the Greenville area.

A Greenville native, Wilson was co-chair of the decorations committee at the 2013 Rose Ball.

That year, Wilson and decorations chair Leighann Markalunas had great vision, great organization and were very creative, Nuckolls said. They also did a great job of pulling in people of all ages to help with the ball, she said.

“They had so many people who wanted to come back and work with them again because they made it so much fun,” Nuckolls said. “I really think we had one of the largest attendances for the Rose Ball last time, and I think a lot of credit is to Wendy and Leighann.”

Volunteerism is something she’s always been involved in, said Wilson, who is married to Greenville attorney David Wilson, and has two daughters, Caroline, 16, and Margaret, 13.

Wilson was active in Junior League of Greenville when she became reacquainted with Nuckolls, who, it turned out, had been Wilson’s fourth-grade campmate.

She’d never attended the Rose Ball until she got involved three years ago when she was asked to help sixth-grade boys greet guests as they arrived.

Not only did she love being a part of making the ball roll, she was impressed with the event itself.

“I don’t think I’d been to anything that was just so complete, from the music to the food,” she said. “Everything is elegantly done, everybody is really dressed up, and the flowers are spectacular.”

Nuckolls said she was very happy when Wilson later agreed to become the decorations chair.

Nuckolls said Wilson has “such a sense of style that she’s able to stick with the theme and the tradition of the ball, yet she’s able to put kind of a fun, updated twist on it without getting too fast forward.”

For years, one person was in charge of the decorations for the Rose Ball, Wilson said.

“They would come up with a table decoration for each room, for every table in every room,” she said. If there were going to be decorations outside the Poinsett Club and the entrance, the person in charge of decorations would decide on that too, she said.

Then, volunteers would spend days putting the decorations together and in place.

At the previous ball, the decorations chair decided to do something different. Designers were invited to design each space under an overarching theme.

Twenty-plus designers also will help Wilson carry out her theme of “Chinoiserie,” a showcase of the origin of roses.

“I wanted to do something different, so I researched and found out the first time roses were cultivated. The first place was China, so we started with that,” she said.

Chinoiserie, Wilson said, derives from the French word for China and represents a design style that became popular in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries.

It is characterized by fanciful, naive and romanticized notions of China. The common motifs include pagodas, dragons, Chinese figures and landscapes that include roses, monkeys and birds.

Wilson, an avid gardener who works part time at her husband’s law firm and sells a line of clothing from New York, has been juggling visits to the designers to get an idea of how they’ll interpret the theme.

The designers are donating their time, Wilson said. The Rose Ball, sponsored by the Charity Ball Board of Greenville, will provide the flowers. Wilson will order the ones designers need.

“I’m really excited because I don’t know what everything is going to look like at the end,” Wilson said.

For more information about the Rose Ball, go to www.theroseball.org/.

YOU CAN GO

Tickets to the Rose Ball, Sept. 18 at the Poinsett Club, are available at www.theroseball.org/.