The Decorative Use of Wild Flowers
NOT every one has a flower garden, but every one who spends even a part of the summer in the country has the freedom of the roadsides, pastures, meadow, and woods; the wild gardens which belong to every man and to no man, where every one is free to gather, and there is no one to forbid. Of course it is by courtesy and custom that this freedom extends to the fields and woods, and it may be that the unacknowledged obligation enhances the privilege of leaving the long, narrow roadside flower beds, and looking for rarer and more effective things along fences and hedges, and in shadowed and solitary places.
If one has acquired the habit of wildflower gathering, and the knowledge of what to gather and how to bring her gleanings safely home; and the still further knowledge of the best decorative effect to be gotten from them, she has reached a possibility of great satisfaction and everyday happiness.
The first important thing is to know which of them have friendly and social characteristics and are willing to exchange outdoor for indoor air, and a diet of good solid earth for thin water; and will neither pine nor remonstrate at the change. Of course, the wonder is that any of these smiles of nature will bear the exchange, and continue to smile; but we find among them those that will behave like fortunate and well-placed adopted children, believing in the ability, power, and devotion of all “grown-ups,” and quite willing to trust themselves in their hands.
Yet in spite of general complaisance, nearly every species has its inherent likes and dislikes to surroundings or happenings, and will behave well or ill according to them. For this reason, successful flower decoration demands a perfect understanding of flower idiosyncracies, none the less interesting because the majority are amiable and insensitive. We all know that some of the friendliest and most domestic of plants — those which will allow us to trample them under our very feet, as long as they grow in earth and breathe in open air — will be satisfied with nothing less; while others of the shyest natures, choosing to live in retired and lonely places, will bear themselves with courage and beauty when brought into the companionship of the house.
Some, indeed, seem absolutely to expand and rejoice in the artificial atmosphere of human habitations, while others would literally rather die than live under the same conditions.
The dandelion, which might, if it would, be the crown and glory of wildflower decoration, refuses to exist except in soil, and will succumb almost before it has touched water. The long, hollow stem, which looks and is a veritable vegetable hose, will not condescend to carry liquid food to the queen blossom. One could reconcile oneself to the immediate closing up of the disk of the vegetable gold, if a bud would open in its place, but this it seems disinclined to authorize. I have discovered, however, more than a compensation for this reluctance of the flower to accept human companionship, in the fact that the perfect seed-globe may be plucked with impunity. Nothing in plant nature is more beautiful, more ethereal, more delicately suggestive of spiritual existence in the blossom world, than a fully developed seed-globe of the dandelion flower. One thinks of it as a plant aspiration, a floating flower-thought, something that stands beyond the vanishing point of matter. If these tender manifestations are carefully transported to the house and placed in water, they will continue for days, waiting for the delayed air current which should waft them to some sheltered bit of earth where they may lie until time and golden weather combine to start them upon a new stage of existence. Ten or twenty of these winged things gathered into a tall Venetian glass, surrounded by newly-grown maiden-hair ferns, will give one a new ideal of refinement in flowerarrangement. Of course, the ferns are sure to shrivel and curl before many hours are over, and will require several renewals, but the dandelion ghosts will stand bravely on until their lengthened days are numbered.
Another almost domestic flower which shares a reluctance to human intimacy is the great white elder. An elder bush in full flower is not only one of the most beautiful, but one most eminently suggestive of decorative use, and yet this great flat expanse of bloom will not bear breakage from the parent stem, and has apparently a rooted objection to house air. It quietly collapses just when we have accomplished our most perfect effects; its circle of thousands of little individual blossoms withering almost as soon as the stems are placed in water. There is a way of circumventing even this positive negative of the elder for decorative use. If we will cut brown, woody branches, where the green stems of the flower bunches are short and closely connected with last year’s growth of wood, the flower will continue to blossom, and even remain fresh until every tiny flower circle falls, and only the beautiful and minute branching of the hundreds of blossom stems remains. These often take on a purple tint with the green, as a foretaste of the color of the berries they should bear, and are in themselves a beautiful decoration.
Those who are unacquainted with its disappointing habits are always tempted by the entrancing color of the orange-red hawkweed, and will continue to gather it until taught by experience that it utterly refuses to live in water. This is also true of the white and lemon-colored roadside varieties, and approximately so of the tall and eminently effective fireweed or purple rocket.
This should by all appearance and reasoning be an amenable and lasting flower, the stem having a robust, independent look which indicates fortitude. The color of the flower stems is even more beautiful than that of the flower, and its want of human liking is a yearly disappointment to the wild-flower lover.
In the case of the fireweed and other reluctant wild blooms, I have found that sudden and immediate change will seem to pass unnoticed, shock being apparently less fatal to them than suspense. If one carries a water jar on his flower gathering, and plunges the stems in water as soon as separated from the plant, they will often go on blossoming in the house without knowing that they have been transplanted.
It is flattering to some human quality in us, some pride of species, to accomplish the adoption of reluctant flowers successfully, but it does not change the nature or disposition of the flowers. This sudden treatment holds good in case of the jewelweed, which hangs its yellow and orange amphora-shaped blossoms along the edges of water courses, but can only be cheated into standing in the water.
All this is very interesting to one who knows what to expect, but disappointing to one absorbed in pursuit of color and effect.
If we prefer easy classification to individual study, it is safe to say that, with the exception of the thistle tribe, the flowers which end their days in winged seeds do not take kindly to captivity. Whether or not there is a protest against it in the heart of a thing which feels its own vagrant and aspiring destiny, we do not know, but the fact remains that flowers which send out their seeds on floating silken filaments cower and collapse when separated from the parent stem.
“Except the thistle,” I have said, and this is truly a noble exception. When one has succeeded in getting together a hundred or more of these great, honey-scented, pinkish purple disks in a corner of the sitting-room, it becomes a haunt for humming-birds; and the out-of-door thoughts which hover around it are quite as much to be welcomed. Yet even this noble blossom will do better in proportion to the length of stem allowed, although it must be added that the stems and leaves wither long before the blossom. Beautiful as it is, it is a very Ishmael of flowers, with its “hand against every man, and every man’s hand against” it,—yet I hardly know a sweeter blossom, or one which better repays gathering.
For house decoration it is convenient to class wild flowers under two heads, those which fade and those which last. The list of quickly fading wild flowers is not long, if they are properly gathered, but it is as well to know, at first, those which have a rooted objection to domestic parade. Having named a few which will not bear capture, it is pleasant to talk of certain families which seem capable of almost enthusiastic friendship for houses and people.
The wild forget-me-not, which we find in Adirondack streams, if gathered in the budded stage and laid in a shallow dish of water, will make haste to expand itself into a heaven of celestial blue, spotted with the starry gold of its small centres. Little children in German watering-places bring them to market tied in wreaths or crowns, which they call Kräntzchen, and which will grow in water as long as their season lasts.
The blue gentian will perfect its seeds in water, going through all its successive duties, beginning its functions of reproduction, under your very eyes, with apparently as quiet a mind as in its home in the meadow. And this pleasant fact is also true of the wild azalea.
The staying qualities of the mountain laurel are not to be questioned. It will carry its wonderfully shaped and textured blossoms and jewels of buds for a full fortnight in undiminished beauty, tempting one to use it in such abundance as to make a laurel season of it in the house; and the same thing is true of its great sister rhododendron.
In the arrangement of these lavish blossoms, form need hardly be attempted, balance being all that is imperative, but a strong blue should be the color of the jar which holds rhododendrons. Something in the blue-pink of its tint is in perfect accord with the deepest, most solid blue of pottery. In a less degree I have found the same thing true of lilacs. This can easily be tested by placing two arrangements of lilac flowers side by side, one in a jar of dark blue, and one in any other color. The blue and lilac will be a distinct harmony, a glass jar with stems and leaves showing through will be a monochrome; any other positive color, — unless it should be purple,— any broken color, or jar of flowered porcelain showing white, will be a positive discord.
Laurel demands pale blue, and the wild pink azalea is never more effective than in a pale blue Japanese or Indian jar, while pink-tipped apple blossoms show their full tenderness of color in contrast with gray or green pottery.
Among wild-growing shrubs, nothing is more decorative than the blackberry blossom at its best. How wonderfully beautiful the seven-foot lengths of bramble, literally crowded with white blossom sprays, can be — overarching a chimney-piece in June! These arches of what is known as the “tall blackberry” are among the most purely decorative effects possible to colorless flowers, and, indeed, counting in stems and leafage, they can hardly be reckoned among colorless blooms. They need neither contrast nor accentuation in holders, glass jars, hidden behind sprays, being competent and unobjectionable.
All fruit-blooms are lasting, and so, indeed, are most shrub blossoms and early flowers, but after June their lavishness will dwindle, and we must look for substitutes in longer seasoned and perhaps less beautiful and effective ones.
There is too little decorative use made of the various flowers of the clover family: the tall and fully odored sweet and king clovers of the roadside; the big-headed cattle clover; the honey-sweet rose-colored clover, and the small white bee clover. One might say that none of these are decorative flowers for house use, but that depends upon massing and arrangement. I have an old purplish-pink lustre pitcher which becomes a distinguished piece of decoration when surrounded by a cloud of the great pink heads of cattle clover. In truth, the beauty of most of our common flowers depends upon the manner of their use. Few flower arrangements are more satisfactory than a jar filled with branches of tall, roadside “sweet clover,” stretching its spikes of small green-white blossoms half way up the wall of the room, and sending forth from every bit of a blossom a breath of flower-incense. This particular variety does not feel at home in gardens or in the immediate neighborhood of houses, but elects to swarm over abandoned brickyards, and along bare processions of railroad ties. It is more beautiful in growth than in flower, yet there is in it enough of beauty to add greatly to the decoration of the home.
The appointed flower decorator of the family will know that, many things that grow are comparatively ineffective in single specimens; and yet, if a single specimen has force enough to catch the eye where it stands among grasses, it will be multiplied an hundred fold by bringing a hundred stalks together into a mass, instead of a dot or mere line of color.
Does any casual flower-gatherer know the blue vervain ? One branching stalk of it, showing from purple to blue, among swamp grasses is hardly noticeable, but I have a tall, deep-violet colored glass, which I keep through June for fleur-de-lis, and through July and early August for blue vervain. Truly the long elegance of its growth, the poise of its steeples of purple buds, broken here and there by a ruffle of tiny blue blossom, make of it a fine and aristocratic rival of the kingly fleurde-lis.
Who has ever experienced a multitudinous jumble of round-headed spikes of loose-strife in a curving bowl of yellow pottery, without an added joy in life ? or brought together the flat disks of the pink and white mallow in the generous bulk of a glass punch-bowl, without devout thankfulness for roadside sacrifice ?
But with all these things, much depends upon their holders; upon the judgment with which the shape and bulk of bloom is made to conform to the shape of the vase; and above all upon this, — that the color shall not only harmonize, but carry a deeper tint than that of the flowers. If massing and harmony of color are taken into consideration, or rather if they are so well understood as to have come under the regularly organized decoration of the house, many previously unthought-of effects are achieved, and become a constant source of delight.
The wild mustard is a growth which will well repay gathering. Indeed, when branching in a yellow cloud from a large, globe-shaped, yellow jar, it is capable of making a spot of sunshine in the darkest room. The spikes of seeded dock blossom, changing through many variations from green to crimson, banked upon its long red-veined leaves, are more than simply beautiful, placed in a large-mouthed, bottle-shaped Japanese jar.
There are many wild things which we have never regarded from the point of view of their decorative qualities, or considered their aptitude for decorative use, simply because they grow under our very feet. Yet some of them are capable of very artistic effect. Few conservatory plants are so effective as the great-leaved burdock. Even when growing by the roadside, covered with the brown dust scattered by wagon wheels, it has a sculptural quality which is quite remarkable. A row of terra cotta vases on the broad guard of the piazza, filled with alternate plants of burdock and long-leaved yellow dock, can be quite as architectural in effect as if they were century plants or palmettos.
One of the most beautiful features of a palace studioin Florence is a great plaster group of a burdock plant, taken just before the branching or flower stage, and while the broad leaves were springing one over the other, enlarged to their utmost limit of growth. These had been cast singly and built up in the shape in which they had grown, showing veining and curve, the beauty of which might easily be overlooked in the growing plant, but was strikingly apparent in the plaster.
I have seen groups of mullein growing on carefully tended English lawns, among plants gathered from the ends of the earth, which were really conspicuous for beauty of form, texture, and color.
A magnificent midsummer effect on a seaside lawn could be produced by a border of marsh-mallow growing in front of the hedge which so often takes the place of a fence. As a rule, all these decorative plants are at their best in the second year of their growth, and would need to be transplanted as yearlings, with a shortening of the long principal root. All of them are semi-architectural, indeed, they might be almost called classical in effect, and therefore are appropriate to houses of some pretentions.
Nearly every one knows that for rustic cottages an excellent effect for outdoor planting can be had by using clumps of the gigantic fern or brake which grows in wild and swampy places, but it is not as well known that the great tufts of swamp grasses which one finds along the same places are as decorative as the flowering pampas grass. It is a great gain to learn the beauty of common things, and it is surprising how soon it is recognized by every one when they are lifted from the roadside or pasture into a place of honor beside the dwelling-house.