Gardening for Little Girls

by Olive Hyde Foster

And then as so few flowers would be apt to slip around, they skilfully hold them in place by means of slender sticks, cut the exact size, split at one end, and then sprung into place across the vase or bowl.

If the stems curve to one side, it is called the male style, if to the other, the female style; the arrangement must look not like cut flowers, but like the living plant, and suggest the growth by the use of buds, open flowers and withered leaves. Good and evil luck are connected with the placing, as well as with the colors and the numbers chosen,—even numbers and red being ill-omened. Certain arrangements also suggest the seasons, one style, for instance, representing spring and another autumn. While we today are not interested in Japanese symbolism, we, many of us, are quite interested in Japanese methods on account of their artistic effects.

Many books have been written by the Japanese on their favorite subject,—some as far back as the Thirteenth Century! Of course you never could read them even if you could find them here; but a Western woman spent a long time over there, studying under the guidance of their priests, and recently wrote a book ("Japanese Flower Arrangement," by Mary Averill,) which explains everything and is full of illustrations, so that you can see for yourself the results of following the Japanese way.

Her most interesting message for you may be one method they have of making their flowers last. During moderate weather it can be done in this country by simply holding the stems of the flowers in a gas or candle flame until black and charred, and then putting the flowers in very cold water for seven or eight hours.

Another book, with a lot of beautiful pictures showing us how to arrange flowers to please better, perhaps, our American taste, is "The Flower Beautiful," by Clarence Moores Weed. It illustrates most of our own familiar flowers, in all kinds of artistic holders, and is sure to give us new ideas about arranging them so as to enable us to bring out their full loveliness. Both of these books should be found in any good Public Library, and in looking them over, you will have a treat.

A prominent New York florist, in showing our Garden Club his methods of arranging flowers, advised (for one thing) filling a low bowl with broken twigs or branches, to hold the stems and keep the flowers in position without crowding. Breaking up a few ferns to illustrate; he dropped them in a cut glass dish, and then stuck in a dozen stalks of pale pink primroses. The result was an inexpensive table decoration as beautiful as any costly display of roses. Personally, I did not approve of his ferns, as they would very quickly decay in the water: but as a child I had learned from my grandmother his better idea of half-filling the dish with clean sand. It holds the stems exactly as placed, and can be entirely hidden by the foliage.

Roses, the gentleman also told us, draw up water above the surface only one-half the length of the stem in the water, and consequently should not extend more than that height above the water,—else the "forcing power" (as it is called) will not carry it far enough to sustain the flowers at the end of the stems. (This may account for my own success in keeping roses often for a week, for I usually take them out of the water, lay them in a wet box or paper, and place them flat in the ice-box over night so the water in the stems can flow to the extreme end.) He also said they should never be crowded together, but rather be separated as the primroses were. Both the leaves and the thorns under water should be removed, as the leaves quickly foul the water, and the breaking off of the thorns opens new channels for nourishment to reach the flowers.

The flat Japanese bowls so popular the past few years, are not only artistic, but good for the flowers, which in them are not crowded, and so can get their needed oxygen. They can be held in place by the transparent glass holders if one objects (as the florist did,) to the perforated frogs, turtles, mushrooms, etc., now to be bought wherever vases and other flower holders are sold. Any one who has tried to arrange even half a dozen blooms in this simple way will never go back to the crude, old-fashioned mixed bouquet! On the tables of the fine restaurants in New York City one most often sees only a simple, clear glass vase, with perhaps only two or three flowers; but they can be enjoyed for their full beauty.

The secret of the whole subject is simplicity!—and you never know what you can do until you try. At our last Garden Show I had expected to make a well-studied arrangement of wild flowers for that class of table decorations, but did not have the time. At the last moment I took an odd little glass basket, filled it with damp sand, and stuck it full of cornflowers, (what you might call ragged robins or bachelor buttons, and which I grow to go with my blue china,) so that the holder was nearly hidden. On seeing it in place, on the show table, I frankly confess I was quite ashamed of my effort, it looked so very modest: and you can imagine my great surprise when I discovered later that it was decorated with a coveted ribbon!

There is one way, however, in which the mixed bouquet can be put together so as to look its best, and our florist-guest demonstrated it. On coming to the close of his remarks he began picking up the flowers he had been using in his various arrangements with his right hand and placing in his left,—paying no attention whatever to what he took, nor even looking at what he was already holding. Rose, daisy, jonquil, primrose, everything, just as he chanced to find it at hand, went together. But,—and here was the secret of the successful result—he grasped them all at the extreme lower end of their stems, whether long or short, so that the bouquet on being completed had that beautiful irregular outline as well as the mixed color that Mother Nature herself offers us in the garden! So if you ever have to put a quantity of mixed flowers together, remember to do it this way.