All Geraniums (except the horse-shoe and sweet-scented), preserve their color. They are very essential, as their colors are brilliant and keep for years. All yellow flowers both wild and cultivated retain their color. The Violet and Pansy, Dwarf Blue Convolvulus, Blue Larkspur, Blue Myrtle, Blue Lobelia, Heaths, the small original Red Fuchsia, Wild Housatonia, and many tiny blue, and even white flowers press perfectly.
For green, Ivy, Maiden Hair, Ferns or Brake, Mosses, &c., retain their color best. Rarely a cultivated green leaf presses well. Autumn leaves, if small, and the youngest oak leaves mix in well. Certain kinds of stems such as Pansy, and others of similar character, are best adapted for pressing.
After your collection is made, take some card-board, without a polish if possible, and arrange your flowers as you design to have them. Gum them to the paper with tragacanth, using a camel’s hair brush, then press on the paper and flower with a cloth, carefully absorbing all moisture, as well as firmly pressing the flower on the paper. Geraniums and some large flowers look better if each leaf is glued on separately.
In forming your bouquet, it is better to arrange the stems first and work upwards. Baskets and vases of moss with flowers are pretty. To form these, you must trace out with a pencil your vase or basket, and glue on the moss. Then arrange your flowers.
I have heard amusing criticisms on the coloring of such bouquets, from persons who mistook them for paintings. Framed and covered with a glass, they make ornamental pictures.
It is a pleasant way of preserving mementos of friends, places or events. Flower albums or journals are very beautiful. Wreaths arranged of different varieties of Pelargoniums mixed in with any pretty green, and other little flowers, such as Lobelias, are very handsome and the colors are durable. Pansies of different shades look well, and brilliant wreaths may be made of all the varieties of flowers that hold their color. The oval shape looks the best for wreaths.
There are innumerable varieties of Ferns, Lycopodiums and Maiden Hair, both native and foreign, suitable for pressing. By pasting each specimen on a separate sheet and interspersing specimens of our beautiful Autumn leaves also on separate sheets, and fastening them together, either bound as a book or in a portfolio, you will possess a beautiful and attractive book with but little expense.
Crosses can be arranged with ferns and shaded to appear as if painted in perspective, and look like a cross standing on a mossy bank, with flowers, &c., growing around and over it. First draw and shade your cross as a guide, then take the small leaflets of the darkest colored ferns you can procure, and glue them on carefully where the cross should be in shadow darkest, then take the brighter green ferns (such as are gathered in Spring,) and end with the white ferns (which can only be obtained in the Fall), using them for the lightest shade; be careful to cover every part and shade it with nature’s colors as you would with paint; in a cross six inches high and suitably proportioned, full two hundred of the tiny leaflets of the fern may be used to good advantage before it is completed. Then take wild Lycopodium if you can obtain it, if not, the finest of the cultivated, and arrange it on your cross to look like a vine growing over and hanging from it; also paste on to it tiny little pressed Lobelias, and arrange small ferns, mosses and any little flowers (wild ones are preferable), around the base of the cross to look like a mossy bank. Different designs can be arranged in the same way.
Be very careful in pasting on flowers and leaves that every part, however small, is firmly fixed to the paper; press them on after pasting with a dry cloth.
