Floral arranging and gardening have been Lilee Fell’s synergistic passions since childhood. As the owner of Lilee Fell Flowers in Sag Harbor, she grew up watching her mother create floral arrangements for garden club flower shows and her grandmother making arrangements for their church’s altar guild.
“I’ve always been drawn to the arts: drawing, painting, color, texture,” Ms. Fell said in an interview. “I was an art history and arts management major at Southampton College. And I just say now I paint with flowers. That’s my medium.”
During college, she worked for Topiaire Flower Shop in Southampton. Spending time in a local private garden designed by Alice Ireys, the designer of the sensory garden at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, also left an imprint. “I wanted to really know how do these grow? What’s the nature of the plant that I’m working with as cut flowers? What’s their ‘wild being’ as opposed to their place in an arrangement? How do these flowers grow in real life? Gardening and arranging have always been intertwined for me.”
One year for her mother’s birthday, Ms. Fell stopped in at Eastland Nursery in Water Mill and filled her car with plants for her mother’s garden. “I learned so much from her, and we’d have discussions about plantings.”
She creates weekly house flowers, arrangements for dinner parties, and floral designs for weddings or parties for up to 1,000 guests. “Most of my clients I’ve been with 15, 20 years,” she said, recalling a conversation she had with a client of 30 years. “He said, ‘You’re like the ex-wife I never had.’ I replied, ‘It’s the same here, Jeffrey.’ ”
Working within clients’ spaces offers another energizing design element. One client has 25-foot ceilings with old barn beams. “It’s fun to get to go in there and do a huge arrangement of quince and pussy willow. When I got them from the flower dealer, they were seven feet tall. And I think, holy smokes, I actually get to leave them tall.”
Ms. Fell also gained early experience while working for Antony Todd, who designs events. One memorable party for Roberto Cavalli’s retrospective gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art included a 350-foot snake of flowers in the Temple of Dendor room. Locally, she does the flowers for the Group for the East End’s annual benefit. She has also done parties for The Nature Conservancy. One year, “I had a photographer take a panoramic photo of Noyac Bay and I had Matt Murphy create an image that surrounded the entire tent. It was incredible, with a sunrise on one side and the moon rising on the other end of the tent.”
Her goal, she said, “is for you not to know there is a designer. The flowers need to have the same vibe that the house and the owner do.” How does she do it? “I think it’s just a natural instinct. You have to pick up on cues; you have to sense the interior décor.”
Materials have shifted over the years, and the ubiquitous green foam blocks of Oasis have largely been replaced with chicken wire for support. “Oasis is packed with the pfas and formaldehyde. It’s really bad stuff, not only bad for the water, [but for] the environment.”
Ms. Fell praises the talent of her events team, who create arrangements to withstand wind, rain, blistering sun, humidity, or the accidental jostle. “I feel anyone can make a flower arrangement if they’re taught good mechanics. One of the things my mom always said is that an arrangement should be able to fall and get picked back up. Just add water and keep going.”
The counterpoint to working with ephemeral flowers is civic involvement. Ms. Fell’s parents instilled a sense of giving back to the community, and she shares her appreciation for nature and the environment. She serves as conservation chairwoman for the Garden Club of East Hampton. This spring she will head to Washington D.C., to participate in the Garden Club America’s national affairs legislation effort.
“Representatives from the organization from all around the country meet with congressmen and are completely nonpartisan, which is amazing. We talk about bills we’d like to get co-sponsored.” Last year, the Garden Club of America supported the Coastal Habitat Conservation Act, which was passed. This year it’s focusing on the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act.
“I think it’s really motivational when you see all these women come together and you realize, at a smaller level, maybe we can do something because it comes from a bipartisan national organization, and it is a very impressive role model. It’s such a good example of how to work together.”
Locally, Ms. Fell serves as a member of the Sag Harbor Tree Fund and the village’s Harbor Committee. Since the group’s founding in 1994, the tree fund has planted more than 350 trees. They recently planted a tree to honor two men in Sag Harbor’s Eastville community who were Tuskegee airmen.
The Harbor Committee plays a vital role in upholding local laws for water quality, environment, sustainability, and wetlands, among other issues. “I recall a quote and it just really hit home. ‘It’s not our duty just to abide by nature. It’s our duty to understand it,’ ” she said. “We’ve got to understand it in order to help preserve it, because otherwise it’s just fleeting.”