The Benefits

I love to have company for dinner. The house clean and sparkling and smelling of lavender and the aroma of dinner wafting through the air when company comes.

And fresh flowers are a must at Linderhof -- garden flowers in the summer and florist flowers in the winter. Not on every tabletop but a bouquet on the breakfast room table and a small bouquet in the bedroom for I love to wake to flowers!

And dinner parties bring out the flowers for there must be fresh flowers on the dining room table when we have company!!!

Saturday night we had guests for dinner . . . and with the heat of this July, the garden flowers are "sparse" so I had to buy florist flowers for the dinner party. But not "florist" flowers but rather choices that looked like they could have come from Linderhof's garden!

Since we had 8 for dinner, we had all the leaves in and I felt that two bouquets were needed . . . and so two huge bouquets of yellow mums came home with me.

Besides the centerpiece flowers, I had enough in the two bouquets to . . .

Add some of the flowers to the Spode pitcher in the breakfast room which also had lemon balm and garden phlox.

And . . . there were still some flowers left so . . .

I picked some more lemon balm and added the yellow flowers to a crystal vase which I placed on one of the dining room end tables.

And today, when we put the dining room back in order (we took the table down to it's original size and put the leaves back in the closet) and placed our big blue and white Asian bowl back in the center of the table, we

Put the two bouquets on the dining room mantle where I think they look quite smashing!!!

The bouquets are ceramic artichoke tuliperes which make flower arranging easy whether it's tulips or another flower.

I love the fresh flowers on the mantle and I shall miss them when they are gone -- sigh -- but that is one of the benefits of a dinner party -- lots of flowers throughout the house the night of the party and for at least a week after.