146 Milady's House Plants 



little assistance can be given, as it is largely a ques- 

 tion of personal taste being applied to current fashion. 

 One of the great njysteries of human- nature is the 

 serious regard given by the most intelligent people to 

 the decrees of fashion in dress, manners, speech, 

 decoration of the home and so forth, '^e source and 

 authority for the decree being entir^y unknown and 

 the passing of the fashion unnoticed^ Fashions in 

 flowers have been quite as arbitrary as any others and 

 quite as religiously followed, and the mystery still 

 exists as to why an arrangement of colors and forms 

 that would shock one generation should be perfectly 

 satisfactory to another. 



Present-day Fashions 



Happily, in the evolution of taste the somewhat 

 vulgar displays of huge bunches of expensive long- 

 stemmed flowers- are passing and more simple and less 

 ostentatious schemes are in vogue. The American 

 Beauty, which rose and reigned and fell during the 

 twenty-five years just past, is an appropriate embletti. 

 of the period. Before that we had the so-called 

 Dutch or Colonial bouquets in cut flowers dnd carpet 

 bedding in the garden. Everything then was short 

 stemmed, geometrical and artificial; today the ultra- 

 simple is the fashion. A fiat dish with one long- 

 stemmed Rose standing up and three or four without 

 any stems whatever floating at its base is considered 

 by many the "dearest thing" in table decoration and 

 the. other extreme is reached. Ten or fifteen years 

 ago the one-color scheme of decoration was almost a 

 fetich so that not only one room but the whole house 

 was at times given over to white, or yellow, or pink 



