CHAPTER XV
Roses as Cut Flowers
There is scarcely any Rose that we can wish to have in our gardens that is not also delightful in the cut state. A china bowl filled with well-grown Hybrid Perpetuals, grand of colour and sweetly scented, is a room decoration that can hardly be beaten both for beauty and for the pleasure it gives, whether in a sitting-room or on the breakfast table. The only weak point about cut Roses is that their life is short. The day they are cut they are at their best, the next day they will do, but the third day they lose colour, scent, and texture. Still it is so delightful to any one who lives a fairly simple life in the country to go out and cut a bunch of Roses, that the need for their often renewal is only an impulse towards the fulfillment of a household duty of that pleasant class that is all delight and no drudgery.
Tea Roses last quite a day longer than Hybrid Perpetuals, but they need more careful arrangement, for many of them have rather weak stalks and hang their heads. Still these may be avoided and only strong-stalked ones used. In most cases they are best by
themselves, without the addition of any other flowers. In my own practice the only notable exception I make to this general rule is with the Cabbage and Moss Roses, the Damasks, and other old garden kinds. Whether it is that they are so closely associated with what one considers the true old garden flowers, or for some reason of their own ordaining, I could not say, but about midsummer I have great pleasure in putting together Cabbage, Moss, and Damask Roses with Honeysuckle and white Pinks, and China Roses also with white Pinks. The combination of these few flowers, all of sweetest scent, seems to convey, both by sight and smell, the true sentiment of the old English garden of the best and simplest kind.
Large Roses are top-heavy, and every one who is used to arranging flowers, must at some time or other have been vexed by a bunch of Roses carefully placed in a bowl conspiring together to fling themselves out of it all round at the same moment. It is well worth while to have wire frames made for the bowls that are generally in use. Two discs of wire netting with a top rim and three legs of stouter wire can be made by any whitesmith or ironmonger or by the ingenious amateur at home. The lower tier of netting should be an inch from the bottom of the bowl, to catch the lower end of the stalk. I have often used three garden pots, one inside another in a china bowl, thus making three concentric rings and one centre for stalk space. Stiff greenery, like Box or Holly, kept low in the bowl out of sight, also makes a good foundation. Roses are best also with their own leaves, the chief exception to this being the beauty of red-tinted summer shoots of Oak, which in July and August are extremely harmonious with the colourings of the Teas and hybrid Chinas. Also in the autumn I like to use with my Roses some sprays of the wild Traveller's joy (Clematis vitalba).
Some of the free-growing Roses are beautiful cut quite long, even to a length of three to four feet. They are delightful decorations in rooms of fair size, arranged in some large deep jar that will hold plenty of water, not only for their sustenance, but as a weighty counterpoise to the flower-laden branches that will hang abroad rather far from the centre of gravity. Roses like Madame Alfred Carrière, that flower in loose bunches on long stems, and the crimson half-double Reine Olga de Wurtemberg, with its incomparable foliage that can be cut almost any length, show by their natural way of growth how they must be arranged in long branching ways. The Ramblers and Ayrshires, too, are beautiful cut in yard-long branches, but are difficult to arrange. Special ways have to be devised for overcoming their desire to swing round flower-side down. But placed high, on the shoulder of some cabinet about six feet from the ground, with the lovely clusters trending downward, they are charming and beautiful room ornaments.
Great care should be given to assorting the colours and in putting together kinds that have some affinity of blood and harmony of tint. It is well never to mix Hybrid Perpetuals and Teas, except, perhaps, some of the more solid Teas of the Dijon class. But Roses well assorted are like a company of sympathetic friends--they better one another.
It is always well to have two or three of the same range of colouring, with perhaps one harmonious departure, such as Madame Lambard, Papa Gontier, and Laurette Messimy, or G. Nabonnand, Vicountess Folkestone, and Hon. Edith Gifford, or Souvenir de Catherine Guillot, White Maman Cochet, and Anna Ollivier.
The same suggestion will be found of use in arranging them in beds, for a jarring mixture, such as one of the orange-copper Hybrid Teas, with kinds of cool pink and white, will have an unsatisfactory effect. Both may be lovely things, but they should not be placed together. But to learn to observe this--first of all to see that it makes a difference, then to become aware that it might be better, and finally to be distinctly vexed with an inharmonious combination, these are all stages in growth of perception that should be gone through in the training of the Rose enthusiast's mind and eye.
It is best and easiest to learn to do this with the cut flowers, and a pleasant task it is to have a quantity of mixed cut Roses and to lay them together in beautiful harmonies--best, perhaps, in some cool, shady place upon the grass--and then to observe what two or three, or three or four kinds, go best together, and to note it for further planting or indoor arrangement. Then, as an example of what is unsuitable, try a Captain Christy and a Madame Eugène Résal together, and see how two beautiful Roses can hurt each other by incompatibility of kind and colour.
