HOW TO ARRANGE FRESH FLOWERS
I THINK one must really love the flowers in order to arrange them perfectly. If you love them you will feel in sympathy with them, and that alone will help you to understand what is needed to bring out and emphasize their exquisite beauty. Yet some knowledge of the rules that govern the best arrangement of flowers is necessary also, for it saves many experiments and makes the pretty task much more enjoyable and satisfactory.
You may crowd a room with the rarest and most expensive flowers, but so arrange them that more than half of the effect of their beauty is lost; and you may have only one flower, but if it be the right kind of flower in the right kind of vase, and placed in just the right spot, your room will appear abundantly decorated and be filled with the beauty and sweetness of the one blossom.
In a house where good taste always prevailed there stood, one day, on the uncovered top of a grand piano a tall, colorless, transparent vase which held just one long-stemmed American Beauty rose. The queenly flower with its stem showing through the glass and the few green leaves attached were all reflected in the highly polished piano, and the effect of the colors reproduced in deepened, darkened tones by the rich rosewood was indescribably lovely. There were no other flowers and, though the room was a large one, none were needed. One's eyes fell immediately upon the rose when entering, and lingered there with no wish to be drawn away by lesser attractions.
It was not merely a happy accident that placed the one flower in its prominent and effective position, but the experience and unerring taste of the daughter of the house.
Imagine a Number of Nasturtiums,
with no green leaves to relieve them, packed tightly into the neck of a brightly colored porcelain vase, and set primly on a stiff mantel-piece amid other prim ornaments. Then think of a clear glass rose-bowl standing on a table, where lie the newest magazines or books, filled and running over in riotous beauty with the same nasturtiums in their free, untrammelled state. The viney stems with leaf, bud, and blossom drooping to the table or hanging over its edge, and the other blossoms standing up in sweet liberty with room to move about if they will. Can you hesitate between the two arrangements? Yet I found the first in a flower-lover's home.
Do Not Crowd the Flowers
Few flowers look well packed tightly together and all are better for loosening up a trifle. Purple violets are almost the only flowers that will bear crowding, though many think wild daisies adapted to this arrangement, and spoil their beauty by making them into hard, tight bunches. A good rule is to follow Nature as far as possible in this direction. Flowers that grow singly and far apart, should not be crowded, but those which grow thickly clustered may be more closely massed.