Plants in dulled colors

What actually won the cup, described — which the award notices almost never do.

Thirty-one years of award notices, and this is one of the very few that says what the winning entry looked like. The cup's class that year was modernistic, announced four days earlier, and a concentrated grouping in muted colour is exactly what that meant in 1943: spare, deliberate, against the massed bright bowl.

The same paragraph gives the others. Mrs. B. A. Shellhart took the chamber of commerce trophy for an under-water arrangement of “Bend's famous white daisies”, and Mrs. Thompson won her second cup, from the Garden club, “for her clever combination of flowers and vegetables in which a head of lettuce and giant beet stalks formed a handsome setting for scarlet blooms”.

A wartime August, and the town still judging flowers on a trophy from a club that had been gone for nineteen years.