Home Decoration : Part 4

American Woman's Home
by Catharine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe

(Page 10 of 44)

On this same principle you can convert a salt-box or an old drum of figs into a hanging-basket. Tack bark and pine-cones and moss upon the outside of it, drill holes and pass wires through it and you have a woodland hanging-basket, which will hang and grow in any corner of your house.

We have been into rooms which, by the simple disposition of articles of this kind, have been made to have an air so poetical and attractive that they seemed more like a nymph's cave than any thing in the real world.

Another mode of disposing of ferns is this: Take a flat piece of board sawed out something like a shield, with a hole at the top for hanging it up. Upon the board nail a wire pocket made of an ox-muzzle flattened on one side; or make something of the kind with stiff wire. Line this with a sheet of close moss, which appears green behind the wire net-work. Then you fill it with loose, spongy moss, such as you find in swamps and plant therein great plumes of fern and various swamp-grasses; they will continue to grow there and hang gracefully over. When watering, set a pail under for it to drip into. It needs only to keep this moss always damp and to sprinkle these ferns occasionally with a whisk-broom, to have a most lovely ornament for your room or hall.

The use of ivy in decorating a room is beginning to be generally acknowledged. It needs to be planted in the kind of soil we have described, in a well-drained pot or box and to have its leaves thoroughly washed once or twice a year in strong suds made with soft-soap, to free it from dust and scale-bug; and an ivy will live and thrive and wind about in a room, year in and year out, will grow around pictures and do almost any thing to oblige you that you can suggest to it.

For instance, in a March number of Hearth and Home, there is a picture of the most delightful library-window imaginable, whose chief charm consists in the running vines that start from a longitudinal box at the bottom of the window and thence clamber up and about the casing and across the rustic frame-work erected for its convenience. On the opposite page we present another plain kind of window, ornamented with a variety of these rural economical adorning.

In the center is a Ward's case. On one side is a pot of Fuchsia. On the other side is a Calla Lily. In the hanging-baskets and on the brackets are the ferns and flowers that flourish in the deep woods and around the window is the ivy, running from two boxes; and, in case the window has some sun, a Nasturtium may spread its bright blossoms among the leaves. Then, in the winter, when there is less sun, the Striped Spider-wort, the Smilax and the Saxifraga. Samantosa (or Wandering Jew) may be substituted. Pretty brackets can be made of common pine, ornamented with odd-growing twigs or mosses or roots, scraped and varnished, or in their native state.

A beautiful ornament for a room with pictures is German ivy. Slips of this will start without roots in bottles of water. Slide the bottle behind the picture and the ivy will seem to come from fairyland and hang its verdure in all manner of pretty curves around the picture. It may then be trained to travel toward other ivy and therefore aid in forming green cornice along the ceiling. We have seen some rooms that had an ivy cornice around the whole, giving the air of a leafy bower.

There are some other odd devices to ornament a room. For example, a sponge, kept wet by daily immersion, can be filled with flax-seed and suspended by a cord, when it will ere long be covered with verdure and afterward with flowers.

A sweet potato, laid in a bowl of water on a bracket, or still better, suspended by a knitting-needle, run through or laid across the bowl half in the water, will, in due time, make a beautiful verdant ornament. A large carrot, with the smallest half cut off, scooped out to hold water and then suspended with cords, will send out graceful shoots in rich profusion.

Half a cocoa-nut shell, suspended, will hold earth or water for plants and make a pretty hanging-garden.

It may be a very proper thing to direct the ingenuity and activity of children into the making of hanging-baskets and vases of rustic work. The best foundations are the cheap wooden bowls, which are quite easy to get and the walks of children in the woods can be made interesting by their bringing home material for this rustic work. Different colored twigs and sprays of trees, such as the bright scarlet of the dog-wood, the yellow of the willow, the black of the birch and the silvery gray of the poplar, may be combined in fanciful net-work. For this sort of work, no other investment is needed than a hammer and an assortment of different-sized tacks and beautiful results will be produced. Fig. 46 is a stand for flowers, made of roots, scraped and varnished. But the greatest and cheapest and most delightful fountain of beauty is a "Ward case."

Now, immediately all our economical friends give up in despair. Ward's cases sell all the way along from eighteen to fifty dollars and are, like every thing else in this lower world, regarded as the sole perquisites of the rich.

Let us not be too sure. Plate-glass and hot-house plants and rare patterns, are the especial inheritance of the rich; but any family may command all the requisites of a Ward case for a very small sum. Such a case is a small glass closet over a well-drained box of soil. You make a Ward case on a small scale when you turn a tumbler over a plant. The glass keeps the temperature moist and equable and preserves the plants from dust and the soil being well drained, they live and thrive accordingly. The requisites of these are the glass top and the bed of well-drained soil.

About the Author

Catharine Esther Beecher (1800 - 1878) was a noted educator, renowned for her forthright opinions on women's education as well as her vehement support of the many benefits of the incorporation of a kindergarten into children's education.

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811 - 1896) was a white American abolitionist and novelist, whose Uncle Tom's Cabin attacked the cruelty of slavery; it reached millions as a novel and play, and became influential, even in Britain.