It pleases the eye that some of the flowers are twisted into curlicues and wreathlike patterns. Most of the fabric flowers are red, which meant passionate love in the Victorian language of flowers. Across 19th-century America, as in Britain, which defined garden fashions, interest in gardening took off like a bean vine, and women took the lead in making plants an indispensable component of a proper home. In the 1800s, middle-class America came to believe that plants offered a particularly appropriate subject for women to develop their minds and at the same time to provide opportunities for exercise and fresh air. Women served as amateur botanists, collecting, cataloguing and illustrating plant specimens.
Floral quilts suggest another idea to gardeners.
The exhibit displays one so-called friendship album quilt, given as tokens of remembrance to family members and friends leaving to settle in the West. Instead of stitching together a quilt, gardeners these days may present a person moving away with perennials they divided in their gardens and potted for safe passage. Whether growing in dirt or flourishing on a piece of fabric, such plants bear messages. Encoded in them is a remembrance of friends who should not be forgotten. News Jobs AP Shopping Archives Entertain.