CHAPTER VI
Collections
TREES.
First in your building collection will be the boxes, arches, and steps of which I have spoken. Dominoes and draughts and chessmen you probably have. Odd chessmen—quite beautiful ones can often be bought for a few pence—are very valuable for our purpose. The black and red halma men are very useful too, but the yellow and green always look cheap and nasty. Card counters are useful, and so is silver paper. Glass drops off old chandeliers are good for fountains, and pieces of green cloth for grass plots. The back of green wall-paper does for this, too; and very realistic grass lawns can be made by chopping up the long green grass that people sell for fire screens. It is really sedge finely split up, and dyed. You cut it up as finely as you can with scissors, and when you have about a teacupful you take a square of stiff cardboard and cover it all over with glue; then quickly, before the glue has time to cool, you sprinkle your chopped grass thickly all over it and leave it to dry. Next day, not before, spread a newspaper and turn the cardboard over so that the loose grass falls away on to the paper. Fasten down your grass plot in a suitable place in your city and build a little red brick wall round it with a little arched gateway, and you will have a neat and charming enclosed garden. For garden beds dark-coloured tobacco makes good mould, and shows up your little rose-trees. You can make standard rose-trees of loofah—dyed green, and the stalks of long matches painted brown. The roses, which are stuck on with glue, are red or white immortelles, and the whole effect is just what you are trying for. Large trees can be made of sprigs of box or veronica, with immortelles glued on, and they will last fresh and pretty about a week. Palm trees can be made of elder stems and larch or of the sedge grass.
Lay the grass evenly and, beginning about half-way down, wind brown wool or silk thread round and round closely and, very like splicing a cricket bat, work downwards towards the thick part of the grass stalk. Fasten the end very strongly. Then stick the stem in a cotton reel or a lead piping pot, cut off, evenly, the loose ends of the grass, fold them back level, cut the stem.
For the city of a day sprigs of southernwood, lavender, thyme, or marjoram make charming little trees.
Shells are extremely useful for decoration and produce the effect of carving. Almost all shells will be useful in one way or another, but I have found the most satisfaction in the gray and pearly shells which you find among the thick seaweed ridges on the beach below the grey cliffs of Cornwall, and the little yellow periwinkly shells that lie on the rocks below the white cliffs of Kent. If you glue these shells strongly on arches and pillars you will find them very handsome adornments.