Like cut-flower arrangements, making table-leading compositions with vines and all kinds of containers delivers a challenging opportunity to express originality and creative artistry. But behind the creativity there ought to usually be planned style. Combinations of plants and containers must be in proportion and harmony with their setting and with every other. Colors and textures will need to either blend or contrast for beneficial reason. Sizes and shapes should certainly be in pleasing scale. It\'s uncomplicated to see, at very first glance, no matter if a table-top arrangement has made its appearance since the plant and container happened to be on hand, or whether the effect was artfully conceived.

There is infinite satisfaction in creating a composition that is both unique and decoratively sound. This is \"flair,\" the indefinable quality that distinguishes the competent from the outstanding, avoids the ordinary but acknowledges a debt to artistic discipline. Flair is the happy result when new plants and unusual containers are combined so they complement each other and fit nicely into the setting.

Vines for tiny compositions can be employed like bouquets for temporary display - either bought just for the purpose, or brought in from the home greenhouse or other growing area, and returned just before they fade. Containers come from everywhere and anywhere, and the ingenious decorator collects them as some people today collect Dresden figurines. She keeps a selection of bronze, brass, ceramic, terra cotta, wood, and other regular containers - and also a motley assortment of bird cages, soup tureens, goblets, compotes, pitchers, bamboo vases, bean pots, glass and salad bowls, kettles, cookie jars, and straw hats from which she improvises containers to suit her arrangements. Some have natural wells for a pot to fit into, other people can be adapted.

The following suggestions incorporate only a couple of of the delightful dangling and creeping plants suitable for table-top or other small decorations.

Suspend a basket or wicker cage with plumy asparagus fern, or davallia, over the center of a sizeable dining table.

Stuff the pocket in a piece of driftwood with sphagnum moss, and insert the roots of a tiny rhizomatous or trailing begonia, or an episcia. Feed the plant by soaking the moss with soluble fertilizer answer each ten days.

Hide the base of a stiff, upright plant with a soft creeper like helxine or pilea.

Below the knocker on the front door, hang a fishing creel with a bright-flowering pot of balcony petunias or put a in a pot on the floor.

For a party centerpiece, let the dainty schizocentron spill its red stems, tiny leaves, and magenta flowers over the edge of a straw bonnet.