3()6 THE FLOKAL WOELD AND GAEDEN GUIDE. 



BOUQUETS. 



'OME years ago, when the pretty girls of Gravesend 

 prepared a bouquet for the Princess Royal, they made 

 the very mistake that was fatal to its acceptance by the 

 royal bride — it was too big, and the Princess was obliged 

 to hand it to an attendant to carry for her. Royal per- 

 sonages have purse-bearers, and, in the East, pipe-bearers; and, 

 unless public taste undergoes a change for the better, a bouquet- 

 bearer must be added to the number of satellites that revolve around 

 a throne. Two or three flowers, nicely arranged, are preferable to 

 the grandest bunch of " all sorts " ever culled from a garden ; indeed, 

 there is scarcely auything in the region of taste so utterly tasteless 

 as a huge bunch of flowers. Just try the effect of two or three 

 flowers and a few fronds of fern, compared with a posy as big as a 

 drum-head cabbage, and you will see at once that it is a sheer waste 

 of beautiful flowers to make them up into monster nosegays. Let 

 me instance one method of using cut flowers as decorations in-doors. 

 Get a lot of white phials, five or six inches high and an inch and a 

 half in diameter. Fill them three parts lull of water, and then go 

 over your rosi s, and cut as many of the best blooms you have as 

 there are bott'es for them. Put them into the phials singly, and the 

 effect will be charming. Take them all out apain, and tie them in a 

 bunch, and you will see that indiscriminate hunching is a wasteful 

 and a distasteful way of using cut flowers. For a large ornamental 

 vase, a fine bouquet is, of course, an appropriate thing, if made up 

 with judgment and with due regard to the effect of colours in con- 

 trast. An edging of ferns or ribbon-grass adds very much to its 

 beauty and completeness. One of my summer pleasures is to cut 

 one of each of my best flowers every week, to furnish a lot of phials 

 such as I have just described. They are arranged in two rows, one 

 above the other, over the tray-board in the hall, where there are two 

 narrow mahogany shelves to receive them. The phials are tallied 

 with the names of the roses that are to be placed in them, by cutting 

 the name out of a catalogue and putting it on neatly. As the roses 

 will be succeeded by dahlias, labels for these are pasted on the 

 opposite side ; so that, for the dahlias, the same phials do when 

 turned round. The labels are varnished, so that they do not wash 

 off when they get splashed with water ; and they are, of course, 

 pasted on so' as to range in a regular row when the phials stand 

 close together. A little nitre put in the water keeps the flowers 

 wood for a week. Another good method of keeping flowers is iu glass 

 dishes filled with silver sand. The stems are cut short and stuck in 

 firmly, and the whole kept damp, and with a glass shade over it. In 

 sprint, a few dishes of violets are charming parlour ornaments, and, 

 whenever the glass is lifted off, they fill the room with their delicious 

 perfume. A good flower ornament may be made with a pyramid of 

 sand, wetted and pressed firm, and stuck all over with flowers with 

 short stems; but a better way of making a pyramid is to get 

 Stead's bouquet-stand, which is pierced with holes, and with two 



