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THE NATIONAL CARNATION AND TICOTEE SOCIETY. 
207 
larger matter, and perhaps you will pardon my repeating some remarks I made 
on the same subject just twenty years ago. 
11 In the first place, as to the colour of the boxes, no one can have attended 
our chief exhibitions without having his attention drawn to the varying colours 
and shades of colour employed by the different exhibitors. One will have an 
imitation of mahogany, another of rosewood, one chooses a pale green, another 
a blue-green, and everywhere there is diversity. It may help us to choose the 
best, if we decide what office the box has to fulfil. We hold that it should be a 
foil to the flowers displayed upon it , and nothing else. To this end, it should con¬ 
tain nothing to arrest the eye offensively, or markedly to arrest the eye. What 
the eye must see in its study of the flowers displayed should be such as will 
afford relief, so that the gaze upon the colours of the flowers may be sustained 
with pleasure for a longer time. No colour will give this relief so well as dark 
green, and no colour is less obtrusive, therefore we have long decided that this 
is best. Dark green is not, however, the best for displaying the colours of 
the flowers. A lighter shade, and one with a slight admixture of yellow, one, in 
fact, closely resembling the tint of the newly-opened rose-leaf, does this far more 
satisfactorily. We therefore use this for the field on which the flowers are 
placed, and the dark shade for the front, sides, and back of the box. 
4 Another important point to attend to is that the colour shall be solid and 
dense, smooth and as polished as a piece of plate-glass. It is impossible to over¬ 
estimate the effect attention to these little matters of detail has upon the 
appearance of flowers, and their influence upon good judges—that is, persons 
whose eyes have been long educated to discriminate minutely upon the effect of 
colours, and sensations of softness and smoothness, as opposed to roughness and 
coarseness. 
4 In getting up the flowers for exhibition, it should be remembered that they 
cannot be handled too little, and that it is far better to show the flower precisely 
as cut from the plant, than to show it with one-half or more of its petals disfigured 
by ugly splits. We observed, however, a serious error in the use of the card, which 
we must point out. Some of the competitors used no support under the card, 
but having starred the interior, allowed it thus to support itself upon the calyx. 
The effect of this inevitably was that every petal was pressed upon the other— 
in short, the flower was choked. Nothing could be more injudicious. The card, 
light and thin as it may be, is far too heavy and unyielding to be allowed to 
exert a pressure upon the delicate organisation of the flower. To prevent this, 
a clear orifice of not less than five-eighths of an inch in diameter should be made 
in its centre, and its whole weight thrown upon a circle of light paper attached 
to the calyx in the usual manner. Not only by this arrangement is the flower 
saved from distortion consequent upon the pressure of the stiff points of a card, 
but another advantage is gained in the ability to remedy, by the play of the card, 
the defect occasionally observable of a one-sided bloom—that is, a flower the 
petals of which are unequally expanded. 
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