Painting with Living Flowers

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23133, 3 September 1938, Page 6 (Supplement)

Painting with Living Flowers

Genius in Decoration

r PHERE is an "artist" in London who J- C an change commonplace rooms into places of enchantment. Rooms of wood, paint, fabric suddenly blossomed with life and colour and .gaiety under the hands of the woman who paints with living flowers, Mrs. Constance Spry. From Royal rooms downwards, hers is the hand which makes the guests exclaim with delight when they enter a ballroom, the Avails glowing with strange and lovely mixtures of colourings, blends of flowers which no one hut she would think of combining, though the flowers have been familiar through a lifetime to all of us. Mrs. Spry lias the imagination to look at a room in which aPP ar to take place and to visualise it filled with people. It was she who first introduced the wall_ vases winch are now so popular even in restaurants, for she realised that when people at a party are standing, the flowers on tables cannot be seen. She knows the rooms and also the gardens of all the great houses in England—and is just as pleased when she is designing a flower decoration for a small suburban drawing room. Because she does tables for Royalty and people in Society, it does not mean that her flower arrangements are expensive. W hen she went over to France to do the flower decorations for the wedding of the Duke of Windsor, it was surprising how slight was the cost, though the result was one which was everywhere commented upon for beauty of shape and colour alike. In winter-time the owners of country houses are amazed when, after they have announced that "there is unfortunately nothing in the garden at this season," Mrs. Spry takes them

with her through their own grounds and makes a rich collection of sprigs, leaves and lichen-covered branches which, with a few flowers and some berries she turns into a glorious and colourful decoration for the table, the mantelpiece or the wall. Mrs. Sprv runs a-' school in Mayfair to which Society girls go belore marriage so that they are capable of "arranging the flowers," an occupation once" thought (as mothercrafr was then thought ol also) to be something which you knew by instinct. There are flower arrangers by instinct, as there are natural artists of inborn genius in music and painting—but they are rare. Mrs. Spry happens to be of their company.