A grand garden for spring

The ambitious director of horticulture bought a flower shop when she was a teenager.

mcclatchey newspapers

DETROIT — Audra Danzak strode through the MGM Grand Detroit’s outdoor garden, watching for progress and any details that needed tweaking.

All around her, spring was arriving in a big way.

Synthetic glass parrot tulips, 27 feet tall, a giant spade and an enormous yellow flower pot were going up in the downtown casino’s outdoor spring display, which officially opened recently with the public invited to a gladiolus giveaway.

Based in Las Vegas, Danzak, 42, oversees the MGM Grand Detroit’s five floral makeovers a year, which also gives her a reason to return to her home turf. (She grew up in Warren, Mich., and still has a brother, godmother and friends in the area.)

Danzak is now executive director of horticulture for MGM Mirage, owner of the Bellagio and other properties in Las Vegas and elsewhere, including the casino in Detroit.

People who go to casinos expect their surroundings to be surprising and entertaining.

So, since the MGM Grand Detroit’s outdoor garden debut last fall, the windswept corner at Third and Bagley has gone large scale: Giant tree leaves for autumn, a giant red ornament for the holidays, giant caribou topiaries for winter and now, giant flowers, all against its permanent backdrop of landscape plants.

The spring show will be accompanied by real tulips, forsythia, daffodils and hyacinths.

To interpret the seasons for these changing exhibits, Danzak collaborates with Design Solutions of Dallas, which specializes in large-scale corporate holiday displays, and with Hamilton Anderson Associates of Detroit, which installs the landscape. W.H. Canon Co. of Romulus, Mich., maintains the plantings.

Danzak also is in charge of interior floral displays in Detroit and interior and exterior horticulture at the Bellagio and several other Mirage-owned sites. That means frequent travel and juggling up to 300 e-mails and six meetings a day.

“I love it. I’m hyper. It fits me,” Danzak says. “I’m busy every second. I sometimes don’t have time to eat.”

HORTICULTURE IN HER BLOOD

Her career path began when, as Audra Wilk, a freshman at Cousino High School in Warren, Mich., she signed up for a course in floriculture.

“I had no idea what it was,” she says. By the end of the second year, though, she was ready to work in flower shops and at age 19 bought a floral design store, Stephanie’s, in Warren; she operated the store for seven years.

Laura Miles has known Danzak since they were in the seventh grade and later worked for her at Stephanie’s.

Miles says Danzak is “a very, very determined girl. ... How many teenagers do you know who buy a flower shop? It was just in her blood and she knew it. She’s made a life of it,” says Miles, of Dryden, Mich.

The two still work on projects together. Miles is employed by Design Solutions in Detroit, where she helps carry out Danzak’s indoor and outdoor visions, working with local vendors and structural engineers, after the design team leaves the MGM Grand Detroit.

Danzak lived in Royal Oak, Mich., after marrying Richard Danzak, whom she met through a friend when he worked at a Troy. Mich., restaurant. The couple moved to Las Vegas in 1993; Richard Danzak works in human resources for Harrah’s.

Audra Danzak got a job at the Mirage as a floral designer and then moved into outdoor plant maintenance. She received an associate’s degree in landscape maintenance and water management and conservation.

The couple and their 11-year-old son, Richie, live northwest of Las Vegas — where Danzak says she can see the mountains but not the Strip. The backyard has colorful annuals and palm trees. They also have a home in Utah.

KEEPING A LOCAL CONNECTION

When the Bellagio’s 13,500-square-foot conservatory and botanical garden was being planned, Danzak worked on the design, which she says “was like a big floral arrangement for me.” In Las Vegas, she has a staff of 140 people.

On sites, she works with local vendors like Terry’s Enchanted Garden in Detroit, which provides daily maintenance for the MGM Grand Detroit’s floral displays in the lobby, restaurants, spa, gaming areas and nightclub.

“Execution is hard, making sure everybody sees what you see,” Danzak says.

During her site visits, changing the outside and interior plantings and arrangements has to move quickly: “When we come in, we’re like whirlwinds, tornados,” says Danzak, who usually spends only a day or two on site.

She says she draws creative ideas from Stephen Stefanou, president of Design Solutions, as well as from her own travels, which last year included the Chelsea Flower Show in England.

It comes down to the drama, the theater, the wow factor, she says, executing ideas on a scale and in a way that people don’t expect.

Recently, in the MGM Grand Detroit lobby, several women walked into the hotel and stared at two dark vases flanking the reception desk.

The large containers had been newly filled for spring with branches of pussy willows so tall that the women had to tilt back their heads to see the tips.