ARRANGING FLOWERS

Evening Star, Issue 21689, 7 April 1934, Page 22

ARRANGING FLOWERS

ENHANCING THEIR COLOURS It seems an amazing and rather amusing thing to assert that flowers need to be lent colour, but there it is. They need a neutrality in tone to enhance their beauty, to 'bring out every point in their exotic loveliness. I have experimented for years with flowers and their arrangement (says an expert in flower decoration). I have used the oddest backgrounds with the most amazing success. I have put flowers in the strangest containers and obtained—after considerable apprehension—the result I wanted. It is an exciting occupation, making flowers grow, or appear to grow, after they are picked. It is no use thinking that you are going to achieve a miracle in arrangement by placing a few branching forsythia in a vase of red lustre. The red is wrong. You will find that there is no colour in the forsythia in a red vase. Put them in a pale grey vase, the palest of blue vases, or a brass vase, the paler kind of brass, and then see the result. Incidentally brass is an extremely good medium for flowers; it gives just enough neutral colour without obtruding upon the flowers. It enhances the reds, oranges, blues, and the lovely variety of colour one gets with verbena, zinnias, and , the richer varieties cf Michaelmas daisies. • Have your old brass coal scuttles polished, and, using an ordinary seven-pound stone jam jar, stand it inside and fill it with flaming gladioli, delphinium, larkspur, and in the winter rhododendron leaves. You will be amazed at the beauty of the massing.