Pleasant Talk About Fruits, Flowers and Farming

by Henry Ward Beecher

Look at the atrocious bridal bouquets! The bride, the bridesmaids, come forth bearing each a huge melange of orange-blossoms and rosebuds, wedged together into a pyramidal wart of flowers! If, instead, the bride were to issue forth bearing in her hand a sprig of orange-blossoms just as it grew, just as it was plucked from the branch, or two or three simple rosebuds on the one stem, loosely clustered, and with their own fresh green leaves, or a simple white lily, would not every one feel how superior flowers were for such an occasion, in their own simplicity and individuality, than when, as generally happens, they are smothered up in an artificial heap, in which all naturalness is utterly lost?

A single blossom of carnation with a geranium leaf; an exquisite saffrano rosebud just beginning to open, with a fresh leaf from its own bush for company; a stem of mignonette, girt round with a dozen fragrant blue violets; a long sprig of mauvandia-vine, with its charming blue bells, hanging

from a tall wineglass, or carelessly trailing round it,—these, and such little things, confer a pleasure on those who have a sensitive eye for grace and simplicity, which nothing else can.

We would not be understood as objecting to all masses of flowers, nor to large combinations. For coarser and more distant effects, they are permissible. But even then, the more they can be made to have a loose, airy, open habit, the finer will be their effect.

But first, simplicity, naturalness, singleness, and individualism in flowers; afterward and inferior, though permissible, artificial structures and combinations.

XI.

ROSES.

July 2d.

June is the paradise of roses. In this month they break forth into unparalleled splendor. All Rosedom is out in holiday apparel; and roses white and black, green and pink, scarlet, crimson, and yellow, striped and mottled, double and single, in clusters and solitary, moss-roses, damask-roses, Noisette, perpetual, Bourbon, China, tea, musk, and all other tribes and names, hang in exuberant beauty. The air is full of their fragrance. The eye can turn nowhere that it is not attracted to a glowing bush of roses. At first one is exhilarated. He wanders from bush to bush and cuts the finest specimens, until there is no room or dish for more. So many roses, and so few to see them! What would not people shut up in cities give to see such luxuriance of beauty! How strange that those who have ground do not gather about them these favorites of every sense! The air and soil that nourish nettles and thistles, plantain and dock, would bring forth roses with equal kindness. There is enough ground wasted around country houses to furnish root-room for a hundred kinds of roses, without detriment either to fruit trees or ornamental shade trees. Men admire them when they see them in a friend’s house; they are always pleased to receive a lapful as a present to their wife or mother or daughter; but it does not enter their head that they, too, might have roses to give away.