TABLE DECORATIONS.
A basket of Parma violets or of valley lilies makes a delightful gift to carry home to the children of the family after it has beautified a woman's luncheon table. Pale daffodils are exquisite in a grass green frame, and so on.
The bottom of each basket is fitted out with a tin plate filling it exactly. Upon this is placed the damp moss which keeps the blossoms fresh throughout the meal. The flowers are arranged in upright position to look exactly as if growing out from the wicker-work receptacle.
Centerpieces are either very low or very high. There seems to be no intermediate stage. A number of fashionable women whose table fashions are watched and copied still cling to the low bed of flowers which allows one to see the face of the vis-a-vis.
A charming centerpiece which smart florists are suggesting is of white hyacinths and violets. The violets used are either of the pale double varieties or the large single flower—usually the latter.
Violets and hyacinths are not mingled. Either one-half of the centerpiece is formed of each with its own foliage, or large clusters of each are massed together. There is no scattering of the single blossoms.
As for the rose basket. It is entirely lovely. It is in use everywhere. It has one fault. It is sure to cut off one side of the table from the eyes of the other half. Women who must have what is newest use it for every kind of social entertaining—dinners, luncheons—wherever a table is used. More conservative hostesses have one for a wedding breakfast or other affair where there is no question of cutting off the view of any guest.
These baskets are really among the daintiest bits of table furniture that the florists have yet devised. Usually the body of the basket is more or less shallow. The handle curving over it is very high and carried out in some artistic design of wicker-work.
Long rose sprays are loveliest for filling these baskets. When well arranged the sprays appear to spring from the body of the basket, to climb wildly upward along the handle and to meet at the top in a mad tangle of spicy blossoms.