Inside the Benz School of Floral Design: A Conversation with Bill McKinley AIFD
Bill McKinley is back for round two — and this time, Vonda has questions. She's known Bill for decades, watched him leave their Illinois classes every summer to "go teach some class in Texas," and heard florists like Ken Senter sing the praises of the Benz School of Floral Design. But she'd never actually gotten the full story. So she sat Bill down and asked: what exactly is the Benz School, how does it work, and why does it matter to anyone thinking about floral education?
Buddy Benz and the only endowed chair of its kind
The school traces back to Morris "Buddy" Benz, a 1930 Texas A&M graduate in landscape architecture (floral design didn't exist as a degree yet). After rising to lieutenant colonel in the military, he started a landscape business in Houston that morphed into a floral design school in the early 1940s, when garden clubs were arranging flowers everywhere but nobody had organized the teaching of it. The first floor of his large Houston home was the school; the rest of his life was travel — Japan, China, India, nearly every continent — collecting art and artifacts as he went.
With no heirs, Buddy left his multi-million-dollar estate to Texas A&M, insisting the endowment be set up exactly his way — and telling everyone he wasn't going to "check out" until the paperwork was done. It was, and he passed away around 1980. That endowment funds what Bill says is the only endowed chair in floral design in the world. Jim Johnson — a former student of Buddy's — became the first director in 1981, and Bill was Jim's first graduate student, which is why he kept coming back every summer to help teach. When Jim retired, Bill stepped into the chair.
What the Benz School actually offers
Here's the part that confuses even Texas A&M insiders: the Benz School is a separate, non-academic entity housed in the Texas A&M Foundation within the Department of Horticulture. It's purely continuing education — no transcripted credits — built for people who want to sharpen a skill or break into the industry. A typical summer includes four classes:
The two-week basic course is the "I've always wanted to be a florist" class — more than half hands-on, covering geometric centerpieces through parallels and vegetatives, plus the business side: what to buy, when, and how far ahead. A new two-day natural mechanics class covers techniques for stabilizing designs without conventional mechanics. The contemporary design and certification prep class, timed just before AIFD Symposium, runs a mock PFDE simulation — bucket of flowers, containers, the clock — followed by written and verbal critique, so candidates walk into the real evaluation confident instead of terrified. And another new offering serves high school floral design instructors, born from a real Texas problem: since the state approved floral design as a high school creative art around 2011, plenty of ag teachers have gone from giving shots to pigs one semester to teaching Elements and Principles of Design the next, with no training in between.
Bill's pitch for attending is simple: participant evaluations run essentially straight fives, and on day one of every course he asks each student what they expect to get out of it — and if it's not in the curriculum, he adds it. Details and registration are at the Benz School of Floral Design.
Train the trainer, 7,000 miles away
Around 2008, a Korean contingent approached Jim Johnson about teaching Western geometric design in Korea. The result is a train-the-trainer program: twice a year, the Benz School travels to Korea to run workshops for teachers — many with their own private schools — through a two-year, four-level curriculum. They're now on their seventh cohort. Before each workshop, Bill evaluates 70 to 150 of the teachers' students, and it's a clever double evaluation: if all ten of one teacher's students are weak on line, the problem isn't the students. Korea now has a large contingent of AIFD members of its own.
A gallery with a halon system — and a yellow coin
Vonda also got a tour of the Benz Gallery: roughly 1,300 artifacts Buddy collected across his travels — containers, sculptures, textiles, Italian and Renaissance and Japanese and Chinese art — displayed on rotating themed exhibits (the current one: symmetrical versus asymmetrical balance) and protected by a museum-grade fire suppression system that pulls the oxygen from the room. Everything is cataloged on one enormous spreadsheet, sortable by country and age, with each item mapped to its cabinet and shelf.
The episode closes with the best two minutes of the interview: Bill's teaching philosophy, told as a story. A person lives in a world where everything is blue — until an envelope arrives through the mail slot containing a tiny yellow coin. What is this? If there's yellow and there's blue, what else is there? "That's what teaching is all about," Bill says. "You can't teach everybody everything. But you can give them that little piece of yellow."
Key takeaways
- The Benz School is continuing education, not a degree program — designed for both career changers (two-week basic course) and working florists sharpening specific skills.
- If you're preparing for the PFDE, a mock evaluation with real critique is one of the best confidence-builders available.
- Great teachers ask students on day one what they expect to learn — and adjust the curriculum to deliver it.
- Evaluate outcomes in groups: when everyone struggles with the same concept, fix the teaching, not the students.
- Education isn't about covering everything — it's about handing someone the "yellow coin" that makes them wonder what else is out there.