The Cornell Reading Courses 



PUBLISHED BY THE 

 NEW YORK STATE COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY 



Beverly T. Galloway. Dean 



COURSE FOR THE FARM HOME, MARTHA VAN RENSSELAER and FLORA ROSE, Supervisors 



Published and distributed in furtherance of the purposes provided for in the 

 Act of Congress of May 8, 1914 



.,.^T ,„ ., o ArA\7 , ,^.r FARMHOUSE SERIES 



VOL. IV. No. 87 AIAY I, I915 No. 8 



THE DECORATIVE USE OF FLOWERS 



Annette J. Warner 



N THE reading books used in school two or three 

 generations ago, there was a poem by Mar}^ Howitt, 

 entitled The Use of Flowers in which was advanced 

 the startling proposition that 



God might have made the earth bring forth 

 Enough for great and small, 

 The oak tree and the cedar tree 

 Without a flower at all. 



The world would be empty indeed if from mountain 

 and plain, garden and greenery, literature and song, 

 art, language, and the soul of man, had been absent the potent influence 

 of the gentle race of flowers. Gems and birds, dawns and sunsets, earth 

 and ocean, would have given manifestations of nature's superabundant 

 wealth, but not with that intimate sympathy with which the flowers, 

 nestling deep into the heart of man, have interpreted the wonderftil color 

 possibilities in a ray of light, and expressed nature in her most friendl}' 

 mood. A few grasses, the warm earth after rain, the salt tonic of the 

 sea, might have suggested a secret garden beyond sight and sound, where 

 the air was imbued with a new vitality; but without the flowers where 

 would have been found the key to this perfimied paradise or the vocab- 

 ulary^ wherewith to name its treasures? 



With no consideration of the part that strvicture and odor of flowers 

 play in the perpetuation of plants, or of their value as reservoirs of honey 

 or as storehouses of medicine, this lesson deals with only their aesthetic 

 service, " To minister delight to man, to beautify the earth." 



Before men were bidden nearly two thousand years ago to " consider 

 the lilies," flowers were used in decorative design and religious ceremonial, 

 probably for their symbolism rather than for real delight in their beauty. 

 The poets of Japan, however, celebrated the beauties of flower and tree 



[1603] 



