FIRST ORANGE BLOSSOM

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 64, 9 December 1930, Page 4

FIRST ORANGE BLOSSOM

Few brides go to the altar nowadays without a sprig of orange blossom, real or artificial, on their heads, but it is only since the middle of the nineteenth century that English brides discarded bonnets or hats for their weddings (says a writer in “The Australasian.”) Queen Victoria set the fashion for orange blossom when she discarded the fashionable hat at her wedding in 1840. Orange blossom for the bride is said to be of Moorish origin, but an old Spanish legend gives it a romantic beginning. Soon after the importation of the orange tree by the Moors, one of the Spanish kings had a specimen of which he was very proud, and of which the French Ambassador was extremely desirous to obtain an offshoot. The gardener’s daughter was aware of this, and, to provide herself with the necessary dowry to enable her to marry her lover, she obtained a slip, which she sold to the ambassador at a high gardener’s daughter, at her wedding, in recognition of her gratitude to the plant which had procured her happiness, bound in her hair a wreath of orange blossoms, and thus inaugurated the fashion which has ■become universal. Many centuries elapsed before it spread over the rest of Europe.

How she painted her famous problem picture, “Service,” which hangs in the Stock Exchange Art Society’s exhibition in London, was told by Mrs. Alix Jennings in an English paper recently. The central figure in the picture is the Prince of Wales, while around him are fifty or more famous men and women. The picture took two years to paint and many of Mrs. Jennings’ subjects sat to her while they were busy at their work, one famous Judge even being painted m the Law Courts wearing his robes.