Petal Pusher

Wander with Leonard Tharp through a Houston flower market and he will flinch at the sight of gangly foliage. "Curly willow!" he will snarl, repulsion tweaking every drawled syllable. Trip past a pile of bamboo and, similarly, he will sigh, "Honey, I have bambooed the world to death!"

As the high-fashion florist in Houston, Leonard Tharp, forty-five, has a reputation that coats the glitzier southwestern territories like an oil spill. "He was the first true innovator in this town," notes Maxine Mesinger of the Houston Chronicle. Even in the face of the city's current economic crunch, his business has lost none of its petals. "We are blessed," he muses. "Short of a nuclear disaster, our clients will make and spend money." He has had designs on the tables of the best: Humble heirs Will Farish and Jane Blaffer Owen, grocery heiress Joan Weingarten Schnitzer, oil-services heir Pierre Schlumberger Jr. and wife Lesley, prominent investor Fayez Sarafim and wife Louisa, Lynn and Oscar Wyatt, and on and on.

"You don't have to own an oil company to trade with us," insists the lank florist, whose small, elegant shop squats on the cusp of River Oaks, next door to the Million $ Cleaners. Party and wedding fees are rumored to reach $100,000. "Quoting figures is really so-o-o boring," he says, squirming. "People here are very schizzy about these things."

Tharp's work champions Lone-Star Largeness; his designs, many of which have been culled for a forthcoming coffee-table book, tend to be colossal explosions of unexpected whimsy. He regularly fleeces roadside ditches and fruit stands for materials. For an oil heiress's birthday party, he felled an Oregon cherry orchard and transplanted it in a hotel ballroom, the white blossomy branches canopying every inch of space. Notes Tharp with a twinkle, "She said she didn't want to see the ceiling."

"Leonard," says one of his ladies, "is the only man in town who knows where we're coming from."

Bill Zehme