"The breakfast is really elegant, but it's geared for the serious attendees who want to make it to the track on time," says Hollis Hibbs Starks, who co-chaired the 2002 event with good friend Susan Moloney Rice. The Derby, held on the first Saturday of every May at Louisville's Churchill Downs, was established in 1875 and is still the country's premier race for Thoroughbred 3-year-olds.

The Derby Day breakfast rotates yearly between Locust Grove, a 55-acre historic site that incorporates the handsome brick farmhouse and grounds established in 1790 by the Croghan family, and Farmington, a 14-room Federal-style home on 18 acres on Bardstown Road east of the city. "We are fortunate to have two such beautiful properties for our event," says Rice. Money raised at the breakfast, the Foundation's major fundraiser, supports upkeep and education at the four Foundation properties (in addition to Locust Grove and Farmington, the Foundation owns Whitehall, a 15-room antebellum mansion, and Edison House, a shotgun home where Thomas Alva Edison once lived). This year's breakfast will be held at Farmington.

A spring rain a few days before last year's event created some moments of anticipatory anxiety but in the end served only to intensify the bright green of early spring grass and to water the banks of irises that fill Locust Grove's gently rolling property. The 160-foot-long white breakfast tent, pitched on the crest of a grassy slope between the house and a small walled family cemetery, filtered the clear early May sunlight of a perfect race day. Vistas of dogwoods, irises, and lilacs beyond the property's log outbuildings created a living backdrop visible through the tent's open sides. To one side of the tent, traditional hammered dulcimer players filled the air with Kentucky tunes as a professional handicapper circulated among the guests offering racing tips. Dapper men dressed in blazers and straw boaters or panama hats and women in elegant millinery trimmed with ribbons and flowers found their places at round tables covered in cheerful blue and green tablecloths and decorated with informal arrangements of cut flowers, foliage, container plants, and fruit. "Everybody's always excited to be there," says Starks. "It's a great day."

Rick Jenkins, Virgil Vaughn, and Rice collaborated with Colonial Designs last year to re-create the easy elegance of a blooming Southern garden under the tent's canopy. Tent poles were swathed in muslin and decorated at the base with flowering bulbs and live plants. Oversized baskets of magnolia, orchids, hydrangea, and japonica hung from the tent roof. Sections of the tent were separated by banks of boxwood and live trees. "We wanted to create a garden room in the middle of that wonderful pastoral landscape," explains Jenkins. "With such a huge luminous tent, it was important to bring in as much color as we could. It was almost like making a temporary greenhouse."

The breakfast's blue-and-green color palette was inspired by colorful stoneware julep cups and punch bowls lent to the Foundation by Louisville Stoneware, a longtime local pottery maker and Foundation supporter. Each informal table decoration was different--potted gerbera daisies, azalea topiaries, ferns, moss, and apples. The menu carried out the regional theme--sliced beef tenderloin with horseradish and bourbon sauce, country ham, smoked salmon, fresh steamed asparagus with lemon-caper sauce, fried apples, garlic-cheese grits, country biscuits with sausage gravy, sliced tomatoes, and Derby pie. Sprigs of fresh mint sprouted from juleps made with Woodford Reserve bourbon.

For nearly three hours, the tent always buzzes with excited conversation and speculation, but by noon the recessional is well under way as guests roll up their programs and head across town to Churchill Downs for the race that is sometimes called "the two most exciting minutes in American sports." Before the dogwoods fade, however, planning will begin for the next year's Derby Day breakfast. "It's a pleasure every year," says Starks. "It's something we look forward to again and again."

Sources:
Floral design by Virgil Vaughn and Rick Jenkins
Rick Jenkins & Company
P.O. Box 4218
Louisville, KY 40204
502/459-0021

Event design by Rick Jenkins & Company, 502/459-0021,
Moloney-Smith & Assoc.
939 East Washington St.
Louisville, KY 40206
502/584-0024,
and Colonial Designs
3712 Lexington Rd.
St. Matthews, KY 40207
502/896-4461

Catering by Brothers Grisanti Catering of Ferd Grisanti Restaurant
10212 Taylorsville Rd.
Louisville, KY 40299
502/267-0050