Second Bloom: Cathy Graham’s Art of the Table

People in the know turn to entertaining guru Cathy Graham for advice on gracious living, in particular how to create memorable get-togethers. Second Bloom covers the essentials of party planning that can make every event shine—flowers, paper components, table setting, and meals. Cathy Graham gives inspirational ideas and tips on how to make the most of these decorative elements for any type of occasion. Quentin Bacon’s photographs of diverse settings—a seaside gathering, a casual September cocktail party, or a lively dinner in honor of a friend—show how to achieve winning possibilities that can be pulled off with ease.

Approaching life with an aesthetic eye and a sense of whimsy, Cathy Graham has always taken pleasure in arranging flowers from her garden, whether for herself or for renowned dinner parties. She also creates winsome, one-of-kind invitations to these parties that are little works of art in themselves. Graham’s sense of beauty is deliberately off-hand, allowing her to scatter the miniature replicas she has been collecting for decades—of everything from laundry detergent to lingerie—in between the bud vases that adorn her dinner tables.

Cathy Graham turns to her passion for enhancing the ordinary occasions of life with renewed zeal, cultivating her garden and working on her sketches of figures from both the fashion and art worlds. In Second Bloom, she shares easy and foolproof entertaining techniques, ranging from artful centerpieces of market fruits and vegetables to popular miniature arrangements of eBay-sourced decorative finds. Accompanied with practical step-by-step photography, Cathy Graham shows how to create lively occasions with simple and original touches.