Page:Japanese flower arrangement.djvu/42

 been given to preservatives had not this desire predominated in all their floral offerings.

Quaint and mythical as these ideas appear, to them the beauty of line is due, and we cannot but doubt if the same results could ever have been achieved by commonplace thoughts.

The idea of good and evil fortune governs both selection of material and form of arrangement. The colors of some flowers are considered unlucky. Red flowers, which are used at funerals, are undesirable not only for that reason, but also because red is supposed to suggest the red flames of a fire. An odd number of flowers is lucky, while even numbers are unlucky and therefore undesirable, and never used in flower arrangements. With the odd numbers one avoids symmetry and equal balance, which are actually seldom found in nature, and which from the Japanese standpoint are never attractive in art of any description.

The different members of the group in a flower arrangement are distinguished by such [36]