Four centuries of flowers. - Review - book review

Magazine Antiques, August, 2000 by Alfred Mayor

Mary Rose Blacker's history of flower arranging in Britain from 1500 to 1930 is as diverse in its aims and achievements as the variegated bouquets that were the recommended norm until the twentieth century. As the author cautions in the introduction, the book "has been especially complex to put together as it draws on so many subjects, including the development of architecture and interior design, ceramics, garden history, social history and the history of flower arrangement." The result rewards the browser more than the doctoral student of flower arranging.

Among the disparate elements that prove the author's cautionary note are illustrations of various flower arrangements to be copied today, with appropriate instructions and the admonition, early on, that since "sphagnum moss is becoming rare, please use it sparingly and, when possible, use the moss from your lawn." There is a photograph of Constance Spry, the doyenne of flower folk in the 1930s, arranging flowers in her house, with the comment that "her use of wooden bowls, baking tins, sauce boats and urns from the garden as containers for flowers was considered very strange." And there is a photograph of a rather forbidding Louise Fisher at Colonial Williamsburg, where she introduced eighteenth-century flower arrangements after her arrival there in 1930.

Since the artlessly artful bouquet of many species and colors of flowers remained fashionable for so long, the most interesting evolutionary thread followed in the book concerns flowers on the dining table. Until the nineteenth century there were two parts to dinner in what came to be known as the service [grave{a}] la francaise. First the main courses were set on the table in such profusion that there was no place for decorations. When this was removed the dessert course was served, so named for the French desservir, to clear the table. With the dessert there was enough room for flowers. Among the more extravagant dessert decorations, as reported in Le Mercure, was that at Versailles in February 1700, where "all the tables were covered with turf as green as if in the month of May; all were encircled with garlands charged with leaves, flowers and fruit." Inevitably, excesses redoubled. In 1753 Horace Walpole deplored the dessert service where "jellies, biscuits, sugar plums and creams" had "long since given w ay to Turks, Chinese and Shepherdesses of Saxon [Meissen] china... wandering on the table, unconnected, among groves of curled paper and silk flowers," while "meadows of cattle of the same brittle materials spread themselves over the whole table, cottages rose in sugar and temples in barley sugar." Those who could not or would not invest in such extravagances could rent them for the evening. The author writes: "Figures, trees, temples, Chinese pagodas, Gothic follies, hedges, serpentine paths, parterres and 'sets' were obtainable in porcelain, silver gilt or enamelled glass, and more cheaply in cartonage (gilded cardboard), with additional artificial grass and gravel."

Then, about 1810, the Russian ambassador in Paris introduced the service [grave{a}] la russe whereby the table was covered with a damask cloth and servants passed all courses to each guest in turn, thereby freeing the center of the table for decorations throughout the meal. This fashion was fully entrenched in England by the 1860s and encouraged its own excesses. By July 1878 a letter to Garden magazine reported, "Only a year or two ago a lady, high in rank and social influence, drove home from a grand dinner at a neighbour's house and ordered mutton chops, as she had not dined, and could not, as both Lady L's flower garden and conservatory seemed crushed onto the table....No longer is it possible to dine in comfort with abundance of good talk to aid digestion, for now there are rocks, lakes, streams, waterfalls, ponds, glaciers, dense masses of foliage and flowers, tanks of moss, zinc dishes and glass dishes innumerable--all piled on the table to swamp the dinner and prevent the diners from either seeing eac h other, or their dinner, or indeed, anything save the decorations."

Evidently, letters to the editor were ineffectual. In June 1890 Lady Monkswell wrote in her diary: "We dined with Shuttleworths and met Mr Gladstone....As to the G. O. M. [Grand Old Man, a familiar name for Gladstone], he was hidden from my view by a huge bunch of red peonies; I occasionally heard his prophetic voice arising from out of the flowers, but I saw not even the top of his head." The author continues: "The same problem was encountered in the United States, where Teddy Roosevelt used to be so irritated by the mass of tall flowers at a dinner party that he would go into the room and remove them just before the guests arrived, muttering, 'If one goes for a picnic one doesn't sit round a bush.'"

Footnotes would have been useful so that the interested reader could pursue these charming anecdotes further, but unfortunately there are none. The photographs by Andreas von Einsiedel are uniformly excellent, and there are two useful appendixes, one giving the common and botanical name of many plants and the other listing the date of introduction of a large number of foreign plants into England. There are lots of tidbits here for the seeker, but perhaps not a three-course meal.