“Why Don’t You?” Wednesday

Well, possums, Spring has sprung, and on Wednesday to boot, and in our own Rite of Spring, we turn, as ever, to earthy goddess Diana Vreeland for suggestions on better living through sheer fabulousness. In honor of Spring, today’s edition is dedicated to all things floral.

And so, without further ado, Why don’t you…

* use up a long ugly table by cutting the legs off short? Pickle it, put it against the windows and litter it with ten or twelve square glass vases of every size, filled with every kind of fresh garden flower.

* if you have a shining parquet floor, have potted cinerarias of every color of blue, banked around the sofa at one end of the room?

* pin edelweiss on your little white boater, as Suzy does?

* whitewash a pair of old linen-closet steps and use on a porch for finger bowls and jars full of flowers or as a child’s bedside table for a lamp, books, and pencils?

* wear a gold flower stuck with an infinitesimal watch?

* put gloxinia in beautiful white porcelain jardinières as Sirie Maugham does in her King’s Road house? They come in exquisite Aubusson colors and are superbly decorative.

* wear yellow diamond flowers in your ears, a flower clipped to the hole of one ear, another flower clipped to the top of the other?

* remember the beauty and smell of white stocks in the garden and in the house?

* consider for your beauty, the creams made by Brother Carolus of Salzburg, who is an apostle of the Apollonian Creed, which advocates bodily beauty as the first duty to God? The creams are made of Alpine herbs and flowers.

* look up the deep mauvish-pink rose which came out in Paris at the time of the devaluation, optimistically called “Better Times”?

* get from Floris their wonderful rose mouthwash?