Part 24

The Japanese have long since arrived at a method of arranging flowers which is quality and intrinsic value as opposed to miscellaneous quantity. The way of nature, however, it seems to me, is twofold, for there are flowers that depend for beauty, and this with nature that seems only another word for perpetuity, upon the strength of numbers, as well as those that make a more individual appeal. The composite flowers--daisies, asters, goldenrod--belong to the class that take naturally to massing, while the blue flag, meadow and wood lilies, together with the spiked orchises, are typical of the second.

By the same process of comparison I have decided that jars and vases having floral decorations themselves are wholly unsuitable for holding flowers. They should be cherished as bric-a-brac, when they are worthy specimens of the art of potter and painter, but as receptacles for flowers they have no use beyond holding sprays of beautiful foliage or silver-green masses of ferns.

Porcelain, plain in tint and of carefully chosen colours, such as beef-blood, the old rose, and peach-blow hues, in which so many simple forms and inexpensive bits of Japanese pottery may be bought, a peculiar creamy yellow, a dull green, gobelin, and Delft blue and white, sacred to the jugs and bowls of our grandmothers, all do well. Cut glass is a fine setting for flowers of strong colour, but kills the paler hues, and above and beyond all is the dark moss-green glass of substantial texture that is fashioned in an endless variety of shapes. By chance, gift, and purchase we have gathered about a dozen pieces of this, ranging from a cylinder almost the size of an umbrella-stand down through fluted, hat-shaped dishes, for roses or sweet peas, to some little troughs of conventional shapes in which pansies or other short-stemmed flowers may be arranged so as to give the look of an old-fashioned parterre to the dining table.

I had always found these useful, but never quite realized to the full that green or brown is the only consistent undercolour for all field and grass-growing flowers until this summer. But during days that I have spent browsing in the river woods, while Bart and Barney, and more recently Larry, have been digging the herbs that we have marked, I have realized the necessity of a certain combination of earth, bark, and dead-leaf browns in the receptacles for holding wood flowers and the vines that in their natural ascent clasp and cling to the trunks and limbs of trees.

Several years ago mother sent me some pretty flower-holders made of bamboos of different lengths, intended evidently to hang against door-jambs or in hallways. The pith was hollowed out here and there, and the hole plugged from beneath to make little water pockets. These did admirably for a season, but when the wood dried, it invariably split, and treacherous dripping followed, most ruinous to furniture.

A few weeks back, when looking at some mossed and gnarled branches in the woods, an idea occurred to Bart and me at the same moment. Why could we not use such pieces as these, together with some trunks of your beloved white birch, to which I, via the screen at Opal Farm, was becoming insensibly devoted at the very time that you wrote me?

Augur holes could be bored in them at various distances and angles, if not too acute; the thing was to find glass, in bottle or other forms, to fit in the openings. This difficulty was solved by The Man from Everywhere on his reappearance the night before the Fourth, after an absence of a whole week, laden with every manner of noise and fire making arrangement for the Infant, though I presently found that Bart had partly instigated the outfit, and the two overgrown boys revelled in fire-balloons and rockets under cover of the Infant's enthusiasm, much as the grandpa goes to the circus as an apparent martyr to little Tommy's desire! A large package that, from the extreme care of its handling, I judged must hold something highly explosive, on being opened divulged many dozens of the slender glass tubes, with a slight lip for holding cord or wire, such as, filled with roses or orchids, are hung in the garlands of asparagus vines and smilax in floral decorations of either houses or florists' windows. These tubes varied in length from four to six inches, the larger being three inches in diameter.

"Behold your leak-proof interiors!" he cried, holding one up. "Now set your wits and Bart's tool-box to work and we shall have some speedy results!"

Dear Man from Everywhere, he had bought a gross of the glasses, thereby reminding me of a generous but eccentric great-uncle of ours who had a passion for attending auctions, and once, by error, in buying, as he supposed, twelve yellow earthenware bowls, found himself confronted by twelve dozen. Thus grandmother's storeroom literally had a golden lining, and my entire childhood was pervaded with these bowls, several finally falling into my possession for the mixing of mud pies! But between the durability of yellow bowls and blown-glass tubes there is little parallel, and already I have found the advantage of having a good supply in stock.

Our first natural flower-holder is a great success. Having found a four-pronged silver birch, with a broken top, over in the abandoned gravel-pit (where, by the way, are a score of others to be had for the digging, and such easy digging too), Larry sawed it off a bit below the ground, so as to give it an even base. The diameter of the four uprights was not quite a foot, all told, and these were sawn of unequal lengths of four, six, seven, and nine inches, care being taken not to "haggle," as Larry calls it, the clean white bark in the process.

Then Bart went to work with augur and round chisel, and bored and chipped out the holes for the glass tubes, incidentally breaking two glasses before we had comfortably settled the four, for they must fit snugly enough not to wiggle and tip, and yet not so tight as to bind and prevent removal for cleaning purposes. This little stand of natural wood was no sooner finished and mounted on the camp table than its possibilities began to crowd around it. Ferns being the nearest at hand, I crawled over the crumbling bank wall into the Opal Farm meadow and gathered hay-scented, wood, and lady ferns from along the fence line and grouped them loosely in the stand. The effect was magical, a bit of its haunt following the fern indoors.

Next day I gathered in the hemlock woods a basket of the waxy, spotted-leaved pipsissewa, together with spikes and garlands of club moss. I had thought these perfect when steadied by bog moss in a flat, cut-glass dish, but in the birch stump they were entirely at home. If these midsummer wood flowers harmonize so well, how much more charming will be the blossoms of early spring, a season when the white birch is quite the most conspicuous tree in the landscape! Picture dog-tooth violets, spring beauties, bellwort, Quaker-ladies, and great tufts of violets, shading from white to deepest blue, in such a setting! Or, of garden things, poets' narcissus and lilies-of-the-valley!

Other receptacles of a like kind we have in different stages of progress, made of the wood of sassafras, oak, beech, and hackberry, together with several irregular stumps of lichen-covered cedar. Two long limbs with several short side branches Bart has flattened on the back and arranged with picture-hooks, so that they can be bracketed against the frame of the living-room door, opposite the flower-greeting table that I have fashioned after yours. These are to be used for vines, and I shall try to keep this wide, open portal cheerfully garlanded.

The first week of my flower wardenship was a most strenuous one. I use the word reluctantly, but having tried half a dozen others, no equivalent seemed to fit. I had flowers in every room in the house, bedchambers included, using in this connection the cleanest-breathed and longest-lived blossoms possible.

Late as was the sowing, the annuals remaining in the seed bed have begun to yield a glorious crop. The fireplaces were filled with black-eyed Susans from the fields and hollyhocks from an old self-seeded colony at Opal Farm, and every available vase, bowl, and pitcher had something in it. How I laboured! I washed jars, sorted colours, and freshened still passable arrangements of the day before, and all the while I felt sure that Maria was watching me, with an amused twinkle in the tail of her eye!

One day, the middle of last week, the temperature dropped suddenly, and we fled from camp to the house for twenty-four hours, lighted the logs in the hall, and actually settled down to a serious game of whist in the evening, Maria Maxwell, The Man, Bart, and I. Yes, I know how you detest the game, but I--though I am not exactly amused by it--rather like it, for it gives occupation at once for the hands and thoughts and a cover for studying the faces and moods of friends without the reproach of staring.

By the way, The Man has hired half the house from Amos Opie--it was divided several years ago--and established helter-skelter bachelor quarters at Opal Farm. Bart has told him, over and over again, how welcome he is to stay here, under any and all conditions, while he works in the vicinity, but he says that he needs a lot of room for his traps, muddy boots, etc., while Opie, a curious Jack-at-all-trades, gives him his breakfast. I'm wondering if The Man felt that he was intruding upon Maria by staying here, or if she has any Mrs. Grundy ideas and was humpy to him, or even suggested that he would better move up the road. She is quite capable of it!

However, he seems glad enough to drop in to dinner of an evening now, and the two are so delightfully cordial and unembarrassed in their talk, neither yielding a jot to the other, in the resolute spinster and bachelor fashion, that I must conclude that his going was probably a natural happening.

This evening, while Maria and I were waiting together for the men to finish toying with their coffee cups and match-boxes and emerge refreshed from the delightful indolence of the after-dinner smoke, the odour of the flowers--intensified both by dampness and the woodsmoke--was very manifest.

"How do you like your employment?" asked Maria.

"I like the decorative and inventive part of it," I said, thinking into the fire, "but I believe"--and here I hesitated as a chain of peculiar green flame curled about the log and held my attention. "That it is quite as possible to overdo the house decoration with flowers as it is to spoil a nice bit of lawn with too many fantastic flower beds!" Bart broke in quite unexpectedly, coming behind me and raising my face, one hand beneath my chin. "Isn't that what you were thinking, my Lady Lazy?"

"Truly it was, only I never meant to let it pop out so suddenly and rudely," I was forced to confess. "In one way it would seem impossible to have too many flowers about, and yet in another it is unnatural, for are not nature's unconscious effects made by using colour as a central point, a focus that draws the eye from a more sombre and soothing setting?"

"How could we enjoy a sunset that held the whole circle of the horizon at once?" chimed in The Man, suddenly, as if reading my thoughts. "Or twelve moons?" added Bart, laughing.

No, Mrs. Evan, I am convinced by so short a trial as two weeks that the art of arranging flowers for the house is first, your plan of having some to greet the guest as he enters, a bit of colour or coolness in each room where we pause to read or work or chat, and a table garnishing to render aesthetic the aspect and surroundings of the human animal at his feeding time; otherwise, except at special seasons of festivity, a surplus of flowers in the house makes for restlessness, not peace. Two days ago I had thirty-odd vases and jars filled with flowers, and I felt, as I sat down to sew, as if I was trespassing in a bazaar! Also, if there are too many jars of various flowers in one room, it is impossible that each should have its own individuality.

To-day I began my new plan. I put away a part of my jars and vases and deliberately thought out what flowers I would use before gathering them.

The day being overcast though not threatening, merely the trail, as it were, of the storm that had passed, and the den being on the north side of the house and finished in dark woodwork and furniture, I gathered nasturtiums in three shades for it, the deep crimson, orange-scarlet, and canary-yellow, but not too many--a blue-and-white jar of the Chinese "ginger" pattern for one corner of the mantel-shelf, and for the Japanese well buckets, that are suspended from the central hanging lamp by cords, a cascade of blossoms of the same colour still attached to their own fleshy vines and interspersed with the foliage. Strange as it may seem, this little bit of pottery, though of a peculiar deep pink, harmonizes wonderfully well with the barbaric nasturtium colours. There seems to be a kind of magic blended with the form and colour of these buckets, plain and severe in shape, that swing so gracefully from their silken cords, for they give grace to every flower that touches them. When filled with stiff stalks of lilies-of-the-valley or tulips, they have an equally distinguished air as when hung with the bells of columbines or garlands of flowering honeysuckles twisted about the cords climbing quite up to the lamp.

In the hall I placed my tallest green-glass jar upon the greeting table and filled it with long stalks of red and gold Canada lilies from the very bottom of Amos Opie's field, where the damp meadow-grass begins to make way for tussocks and the marshy ground begins.

The field now is as beautiful as a dream; the early grasses have ripened, and above them, literally by the hundreds,--rank, file, regiment, and platoon,--stand these lilies, some stalks holding twenty bells, ranged as regularly as if the will of man had set them there, and yet poised so gracefully that we know at once that no human touch has placed them. I wish that you could have stood with me in the doorway of the camp and looked across that field this morning. Bart declared the sight to be the first extra dividend upon our payment to Amos Opie for leaving the grass uncut.