Although people have enjoyed the beauty of cut flowers in their homes for hundreds of years, the flora found on dining tables wasn’t always of the garden variety. In seventeenth and eighteenth century France, for example, real blooms were thought to be too rustic and uncultured to be placed indoors. (After all, they had never even been to one opera, much less went to college). Flowers made from beads and feathers often adorned tables, sideboards and consoles.
It wasn’t until the Victorian era of the late nineteenth century that real flowers came into vogue. Like everything of the period, the rush was on for who could display the most elaborate curlicues and rococo flourishes. Flowers became so profuse that they often upstaged the food, not to mention overpowering most noses. For some bored members of the upper classes and the nobility, floral adornment became a race for the flourish, somewhat like keeping up with the Joneses, but on a much more elaborate and I might add, smelly scale.
Take for example the French count, Robert de Montesquiou. He was known to have once entertained his dinner guests with an array of small jewel encrusted turtles that crawled unselfishly among the goblets and duck pate. The creatures asked for nothing in return for their glittering parade, not even so much as an entertainment tax. Not to be outdone, for how could one live afterward, nineteenth century heiress, Caroline Astor, once mounded sand down the center of her long sideboard in which she buried tiny but real emeralds, rubies and sapphires. Each place setting held a small silver beach bucket and shovel so guests could dig for treasure while awaiting dessert!
Do YOU have a flower story to tell that would amuse the masses? Please share.
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