Nothing is so pretty for the breakfast- or dinner-table as a tall, slender vase which carries the floral decoration high up above the articles of food. Nor is a garden necessary for this species of decoration. Wild flowers, ferns, grasses, and all the beautiful furniture of forest and field, make these vases doubly elegant.
In the rose season—in the sweet days of June—most country gardens overflow with the always regal flower; and this is a table ornament of the highest. The great, broad, low baskets are best for these full, rich queens of color and fragrance. Mass your roses for the middle of the table, and have specimen glasses for some of the more rare varieties. The rose is a cleanly flower, and can be put anywhere near food. But if an unlucky visitor has the rose-cold, then it must be put far away; for the subtile, pungent odor of a rose makes the sufferer sneeze fearfully. There are some families in which roses are thus tabooed.
A basket of roses is the prettiest thing in the world; and the lady going into the country for the summer had better supply herself with a number of these, with handles, from the florist or the basket-maker. If she gets a tin pan also fitted in cunningly, she has the loveliest table ornamentation all ready. Her buffets, her parlor-table, her piano, her brackets can all hold these pleasant things, for which no money need be paid, but which have a value far above money. Never give these baskets a heavy, packed look, but allow plenty of the rich green leaves of the rose to set them off. It seems to us that ladies might create an endless succession of Home Amusements by studying how to vary the effect of their vases and baskets of flowers.
A simple bunch of yellow buttercups in the early spring will make a purple room perfectly beautiful; and dandelions can be massed with great effect. Yellow flowers are rare, but necessary to produce fine contrasts of color. We all tend too much to the red and white easily-obtained effects. They are poor compared with what we can do.
If Fashion has rather run its worship of the daisy into the ground, Fashion might have done a worse thing. We can scarcely blame Fashion for going back to this impressive flower, which in its simplicity has moved all philosophers, poets, and fortune-tellers to admire and study it.
It seems to us that something more cheerful than our usual Christmas decorations could be invented. We make them too somber. Try mixing in the beautiful bitter-sweet berries, which are so very easily obtained, and which keep all winter. The holly is not so common with us as in England; still, many a New England swamp produces a host of hips and haws and red berries.
The business of preserving autumn-leaves shows ten failures to one success. Yet, when autumn leaves are well preserved, they are very charming means of winter decoration. They are luminous at evening, and, mixed with ferns and grasses, are perpetual bouquets. But do not varnish them: that gives them a waxy effect, which is detestable. Press them carefully, and iron them under a piece of brown paper. That seems to preserve the color.
Grasses, on the contrary, and a thousand pods and seed-vessels, grains and cat-tails, and certain weeds, dry into beautiful colors and make most wonderful groups for the parlor mantel. The young ladies of our vast continent can not do a better thing than to each year add to these beautiful and most graceful bouquets, which retain, like the fabled Dryads, all the fascination of Nature, even when they have passed into sticks and dry leaves.