There are many plants—for instance, the bedstraw and the madder—that have their sets of leaves arranged in a whorl round the joints of their upright stems; looking down on these leaves we notice that the plan appears like a rosette. This idea may have occurred to the ancients when designing their rosettes. The results, obtained by grouping a cluster of leaves together in this manner, are finer and stronger in appearance than any imitation of flowers, particularly in sculptured work. (See Fig. 136.) Leaflets and bracts growing at the junctions of stems and leaves also furnished ideas and forms for the making up of rosettes and similar ornament; but more use is made of these bracts in what is called “clothing stems,” or sheaths, some varieties of which are illustrated at Figs. [137] and [157]; in fact, very good ornament is often composed of a stem or meander clothed with these bracts alone. Root forms are not much used in European ornament, though Indian, Saracen, and Mediæval decoration abound in examples of the treatment of roots. (See [Fig. 138].) The objection to their use is this, that it gives the whole ornament the appearance of having been pulled up and hung to dry. This must always be an objection to their use, unless the root can be shown in the ground; consequently the Roman and Renaissance artists let their ornament
Fig. 137.—Bracts used for “clothing” stems in scrolls, &c.
spring from vases or clusters of leaves. When roots are used it is clear that the general outline of the root must alone be taken, and the character of the growth expressed simply, to prevent confusion and obscurity.
Fig. 138.—Mediæval and Oriental root forms.
As a rule, all redundances, excrescences, and accidental waywardness of growth, that might be interesting to a botanist, ought to be avoided in the decorative rendering of plant form; the average form and the higher beauties should alone be expressed. Though this may seem a paradox, the less realistic we make our designs, the more nature we put into them. We should strive to put the most perfect forms of nature into our ornament, avoiding those that are poor and stunted, as well as over-nourished and rank ones, though nature abounds in both.