It’s National Floral Design Day, which seems like a Perfectly Proper opportunity to discuss how we arrange and display flowers on our tables and in our homes. “Low centerpieces!” hostesses and event planners carp at us. “Low centerpieces! We want to be able to see people across the table.” Well . . . obviously. So why the emphasis? Because back in the day, before living memory, it was a vogue to have high centerpieces that blocked the view.
Etiquetteer is not just talking about that exuberant Victorian hideousness the epergne, but walls of flowers up and down a table. Etiquetteer’s beloved Ellen Maury Slayden dined at the Mexican embassy in Washington back in 1898 and recorded “The dinner was fairly good and well served, but flowers and candles were so thick down the center of the table that the people opposite you seemed in ambush.”* That might be a very luxurious impression to make, but it had a restrictive impact.
An 1889 White House dinner. Notice the elevated barricade of flowers at center.
Achieving good floral design might be the creative tension between Mae West and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe — “Too much of a good thing is wonderful” vs. “Less is more.”
A Perfectly Proper centerpiece does not dominate a table, but enhances it. This means not only considering how tall it is, but also how its colors harmonize with everything else on the table, and with the room itself. And the scent! Nothing could be more charming than a row of hyacinths in pots down a table, but their otherwise delightful aroma could slay an entire buffet of garlic. Nor will Etiquetteer forget being seated at a restaurant by a sideboard sporting the sinister beauty of rubrum lilies, so overpowering Etiquetteer’s hosts had to ask that they be removed.
Outside the dining room, let us consider the subtle aesthetic of the Countess Olenska in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. Newland Archer, fascinated by her drawing room, noted “the fact that only two Jacqueminot roses (of which nobody ever bought less than a dozen) had been placed in the slender vase at his elbow.” And Mr. van der Luyden observed “She has a real gift for arranging flowers. I had sent her a few carnations from Skuytercliff, and I was astonished. Instead of massing them in big bunches as our head-gardener does, she had scattered them about loosely, here and there ... I can’t say how.”
Etiquetteer wishes you low, beautiful and unobtrusive flowers on your table, and sparkling conversation over them.
*Washington Wife, by Ellen Maury Slayden, page 13.