Mighty Unlak a Rose

Readers of Accent on Living will recall ELIZABETH WARD’S knitting difficulties, which she described in this department in the August, 1945, Atlantic.

by ELIZABETH WARD

ANYONE who thinks she can win a prize at a flower show today by tossing a handful of red roses into a silver bowl and calling it “Red Roses in a Silver Bowl” is living in the past, and if she will hop the nearest horseless carriage and head out my way, I shall be glad to bring her up to date.

In the first place, there isn’t going to be any class entitled “Red Roses in a Silver Bowl,” the way there used to be in the innocent old days, when flower fixing Was considered a ladylike accomplishment and Constance Spry was a wee slip of a lassie, barely able to crush a butterfly in her tiny list. As a matter of fact, there probably won’t be any bowls either; or any vases, or jars, or compotes. Furthermore, if the present trend persists, there may not even be any flowers. A bowl of flowers is becoming as obsolete at a flower show as humor in a comic strip, and I have scars in prove it.

Exhorted by nay mother, who was exhibiting at the monthly meeting of our local Garden Club, I spent an entire week-end rubbing furniture wax on a decayed piece of driftwood destined to be the vehicle for “An Arrangement of Plant Material Suggesting Restraint, in a Container Not Originally Intended to Hold Flowers.” I am by trade a draftsman, and my preference in flower arrangements runs to the neat and orderly, symmetrically disposed about a well-defined center line. My relatives deplore my taste but they trust me with the legwork, all right, all right.

I exaggerate when I say I spent the whole weekend polishing the driftwood, because it took most of Saturday to find a piece that would meet the specifications. I scoured our river beach like a welltrained retriever, trotting hopefully up and down the steep bank with armfuls of lumber until our lawn looked like the aftermath of a hurricane. We were “going into a niche,” as we horticulturists say, which meant that our exhibit had to fit into an open-front plasterboard box about the size and shape of an orange crate. Then, our piece had to be gnarled and twisted — “interesting” in contour — and it had to have a hollow or pocket capable of holding the restraint-suggesting plant material.

It was the time of year when our riverbank produces a particularly vicious species of bramble and the beach is densely populated with clam diggers; but as the morning wore on I almost preferred the brambles to the interest shown by the diggers.

“It’s for my mother,”I explained as I tussled with a submerged willow tree. But this only piqued their curiosity still further.

Towards the end of the morning I produced a piece that brought a faint glimmer of pleasure to the face of the exhibitor, and I was about to retire and bind up my wounds when my sister Zinnia appeared. Zinnia is chairman of the Flower Show committee, and is a ruthless and tireless perfectionist. She once drove 140 miles in an equinoctial storm in search of teasels, which she then proceeded to paint yellow, to go with her living room. I don’t understand the ethics involved, because I once heard Zinnia say of a fellow Garden Club member, in a low, shocked voice, “She shellacs her ivy!” and everyone present shook her head and looked as horrified as it the offender had had some loathsome disease. You mustn’t oil your magnolia leaves, either. I don’t known why; I’m just telling you that doors will be slammed in your face if you do. But you can paint your teasels and still be accepted by decent people everywhere.

Zinnia’s nauseated expression when I showed her my prize was pitiful to see, so I plunged back down ihe bank and came up with the trunk of an elm tree that had blown down during the blizzard of ‘88 and was suitably decayed and gnarled. We dislodged a leprous-looking fragment that threw mv mother and sister into near hysteria, from which Zinnia emerged at length to give me “finishing" instructions.

Janet simonizes them, she said. “It gives the most lovely finish.” I said feebly that I hated to lake a chance on spoiling the patina—it looked to me more like an old tonsil than anything else, but they liked it — and that furthermore we didn’t have any more Simoniz, because I had used it all up on the car, in my old-fashioned way. But Zinnia reassured me, thrust a tin of furniture wax into my hands, and drove off to assemble a nosegay of celgrass for her own exhibit.

My mother arranged young skunk cabbages and hairy, unfurled ferns in the driftwood; and if you think that skunk cabbage is a common, ugly, smelly plant, it just shows how uneducated youand I are. Just why this extravaganza suggested restraint I am unable to say; but it did to the judges, who awarded it Second Prize. I haven’t inquired about the First Prize winner. I’m afraid to.