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 background 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.
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.