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Summer Wedding Decorations
- EVERY girl can have a pretty wedding especially if she lives within reach of the free woods and fields or in a place of gardens and shrubbery.
Wild roses and wild clematis vines with ferns from the woods are lovely in a country church where festoons and garlands are often needed to adorn the bare walls.
Banks of black-eyed Susans with outdoor ferns, bowers of snowy dogwood in season and the fluffy wild pink azalea are very decorative, and so are the spring and early summer shrubs: syringa, deutzia, flowering almond and Japanese snowball.
Mountain laurel, with its exquisite pink flowers and glossy green leaves, lends itself particularly to church decoration. Ropes of the leaves may be looped from the roof to the side walls; and the blossoms massed in the front of the church make a fitting back- [140] ground for a bride and her pink-clad attendants.
In the South, Cape jasmine, in the Far West, the golden California poppies and carnations, are beautiful to use. Of course, nothing is lovelier than roses - pink and white and should they prove scarce they can be successfully supplemented with pink and white peonies, especially for church decoration purposes.
Meadow rue in great misty clumps as it grows, arranged with tawny field lilies and dark green wood ferns, is remarkably striking in a church.
At one home wedding, big loose bunches of feathery grass, buttercups, daisies, and clover in brown earthern jars filled the corners of the living-room, and in the bay window, where the ceremony took place, tall graceful sprays of Queen Anne's lace arranged with plenty of green, made an artistic background.
Glass vases filled with it stood on the window sills and on the floor, the tops of the floor bouquets hiding the window receptacles. [141] 1 In the dining-room a bowl of pink and white clover occupied the center of the table and there were window boxes of the same sweet flower [142]
An argument, not a list: that a wedding can be made beautiful out of what grows in the woods, the fields and a garden. Almost every plant named is wild or hardy, and the one bought flower mentioned is the carnation.
- Wild material wilts fastQueen Anne’s lace, buttercups, daisies, clover and meadow rue are all short-lived once cut. They need cutting early in the cool, going straight into deep water, and standing somewhere cold until the last moment. The page does not say so because the flowers came in that morning and went out that afternoon.
- Cutting from the wild is now restrictedTaking wild plants from public land and roadsides is regulated in most places, and dogwood, wild azalea and mountain laurel are protected where they grow. A reader following this page needs permission, private land, or a garden, and that changes the economics the author is relying on.
- Mountain laurel is poisonousThe page recommends roping its leaves from the roof and massing the flowers at the front of the church. The plant is toxic if any part of it is eaten, so keep it clear of food tables and well out of reach of small children. As pure architecture high on a wall it is as good as the page says.
- Peonies as the substitute for rosesShould they prove scarce they can be successfully supplemented with pink and white peonies. It is sound advice: peonies carry at the same scale as garden roses, read from a distance, and hold up out of water longer. They remain the right answer to the same problem.
- Hide the container, do not style itAt the home wedding the glass vases on the floor are concealed by the tops of the bouquets in front of them, and the field flowers go into brown earthen jars. The only staging instruction on the page is to make the vessel disappear, which is still the quickest improvement available to an amateur arrangement.
- The regional lists tell you the book travelledCape jasmine for the South, California poppies and carnations for the Far West, mountain laurel and dogwood for the Northeast. A modern florist’s list is national and seasonless because the flowers are flown in; this one changes with the reader’s address, and gives a better wedding for it.
Every girl can have a pretty wedding is the first line, and the sentence that follows qualifies it: especially if she lives within reach of the free woods and fields. The chapter is addressed to someone without money for flowers, and its whole case is that the look of an expensive wedding is available for the price of labour — somebody’s afternoon spent cutting armfuls of laurel, a family rounded up to rope the walls of a bare country church. The home wedding described at the end, with the ceremony in a bay window and Queen Anne’s lace standing in jars on the floor, is the argument proved. What it required was not a budget but people, and a house with a garden and woods near it.