Chapter III: Part 3

Thus we generalize. And as long as one may generalize he is comparatively safe from humiliating criticism. It is only when he begins to name things by name and say what is best for just where, that he touches the naked eyeball (or the funny-bone) of others whose crotchets are not identical with his. Yet in Northampton this is what we have to do, and since the competitors for our prizes always have the Where before they are moved to get and place the What, we find our where-and-what problem easiest to handle when we lift it, so to speak, by the tail. Then it is "What to Plant Where," and for answer we have made a short list of familiar flowering shrubs best suited to our immediate geographical locality. We name only fourteen and we so describe each as to indicate clearly enough, without dictating, whereabouts to put it. We begin:

"Azalea. Our common wild azalea is the flowering bush best known as 'swamp honeysuckle.' The two azaleas listed here, _A. mollis_ and the Ghent varieties, are of large, beautiful and luxuriant bloom, and except the 'swamp honeysuckle' are the only azaleas hardy in western Massachusetts. Mollis is from two to six feet high, three to six feet broad, and blooms in April and May. Its blossoms are yellow, orange or pink, single or double. Its soil may be sandy or peaty, and moist, but any good garden soil will serve; its position partly shaded or in full sunlight. The Ghents are somewhat taller and not so broad in proportion. They bloom from May to July, and their blossoms are white, yellow, orange, pink, carmine, or red, single or double. Soil and position about the same as for mollis.

"Berberis. Berberis is the barberry, so well known by its beautiful pendent berries. It is one of the best shrubs to use where a thorny bush is wanted. _B. vulgaris_, the common sort, and one of the most beautiful, grows from four to eight feet high, with a breadth of from three to six feet. _B. Thunbergii_, or Thunberg's barberry, is the well-known Japanese variety, a dense, drooping bush from two to four feet high and somewhat greater breadth. Its pale-yellow blossoms come in April and May, and its small, slender, bright-red berries remain on the spray until spring. A dry soil is the best for it, though it will grow in any, and needs little shade or none. _B. purpurea_ is a variety of vulgaris and is as handsome as the common. It answers to the same description, except that its foliage is purple, which makes it very tempting to new gardeners, but very hard to relate in good artistic taste among the other shrubs of the garden. Few small gardens can make good use of purple foliage.

"_Deutzia gracilis._ The gracilis is one of the most beautiful of all the deutzias. Its delicate foliage of rather light green, its snowy flowers and its somewhat bending form, make it one of the fairest ornaments of the home grounds. Its height is three feet, its breadth from two to four feet. It blooms in May and June. Its soil may be any well-drained sort, and its position any slightly sheltered aspect."

So we hurry down the alphabet. The list is short for several good reasons, one being that it is well to give other lists from season to season. No doubt our inaccuracies would distress a botanist or scientific gardener, but we convey the information, such as it is, to our fellow citizens, and they use it. In the last ten years we have furnished to our amateurs thousands of shrubs and plants, at the same reduced rates for a few specimens each which we pay for them by the hundred.

But of the really good sorts are there shrubs enough, you ask, to afford new lists year after year? Well, for the campus of a certain preparatory school for boys, with the planting of which the present writer had somewhat to do a few years ago, the list of shrubs set round the bases of four large buildings and several hundred yards of fence numbered seventy-five kinds. To end the chapter, let us say something about that operation. On a pictorial page or two we give ourselves the pleasure of showing the results of this undertaking; but first, both by pictures and by verbal description let me show where we planted what. Of course we made sundry mistakes. Each thing we did may be vulnerable to criticism, and our own largest hope is that our results may not fall entirely beneath that sort of compliment.

This campus covers some five acres in the midst of a small town. Along three of its boundaries old maples and elms, in ordinary single-file shade-tree lines, tower and spread. On the fourth line, the rear bound, a board fence divides the ground from the very unattractive back yards, stables and sheds of a number of town residents. The front lies along the main street of the place, facing the usual "shop-row." The entire area has nearly always been grassed. Not what an Englishman would call so, but turfed in a stuttering fashion, impetuous and abashed by turns, and very easy to keep off; most rank up against the granite underpinnings of the buildings, and managing somehow to writhe to all the fences, of which those on the street fronts are of iron. Parallel with the front fence and some fifty feet behind it, three of the institution's buildings stand abreast and about a hundred feet apart. All three are tall, rectangular three-story piles of old red brick, on granite foundations, and full of windows all of one size, pigeon-house style. The middle one has a fairly good Greek-pillared porch, of wood, on the middle half of its front.

Middle Hall, Williston Seminary, facing the main street of the town.]

Among these buildings we began our planting. We had drawn, of course, a ground plan of the whole place, to scale, showing each ground-floor door and window, so that we might respect its customary or projected use. A great point, that, in Where to Plant What. I once heard of a school whose small boys were accused of wantonly trampling down some newly set shrubs on the playground. "Well," demanded one brave urchin, "what made 'em go and plant a lot of bushes right on first base?" And no one was ready with an answer, for there is something morally wrong about any garden that will rob a boy of his rights.

With this ground plan before us we decided indoors where to plant what outdoors and calculated arithmetically the number of each sort of shrub we should need for the particular interval we designed that sort to fill. Our scheme of arrangement was a crescendo of foliage and flower effects, beginning on the fronts of the buildings and rising toward their rears, while at all points making more of foliage than of bloom, because the bloom shows for only a month or less, while the leaf remains for seven or more. Beginning thus with our quietest note, the interest of any one looking in, or coming in, from the public front is steadily quickened and progressively rewarded, while the crowning effects at the rear of the buildings are reserved for the crowning moment when the visitor may be said to be fully received. On the other hand, if the approach is a returning one from the rear of the entire campus,--where stands the institution's only other building, a large tall-towered gymnasium, also of red brick,--these superlative effects show out across an open grassy distance of from two hundred to three hundred feet.

Wherefore--and here at last we venture to bring names of things and their places together--at the fronts of the northernmost and southernmost of these three "Halls" we set favorite varieties of white-flowering spireas (_Thunbergia, sorbifolia_, _arguta_, _Van Houttei_), the pearl-bush (_exochorda_), pink diervillas, and flowering-almonds. After these, on the southern side of the southernmost building, for example, followed lilacs, white and purple, against the masonry,--the white against the red brick, the lilac tint well away from it,--with tamarisk and kerria outside, abreast of them, and then pink and red spireas (_Bumaldi_ and its dwarf variety, _Anthony Waterer_). On the other side of the same house we set deutzias (_scabra_ against the brick-work and _Lemoynei_ and _gracilis_ outside). In a wing corner, where melting snows crash down from a roof-valley, we placed the purple-flowered _Lespedeza penduliflorum_, which each year dies to the ground before the snow-slides come, yet each September blooms from three to four feet high in drooping profusion. Then from that angle to the rear corner we put in a mass of pink wild roses. Lastly, on the tall, doorless, windowless rear end, we planted the crimson-rambler rose, and under it a good hundred of the red rugosas.

In the arrangement of these plantings we found ourselves called upon to deal with a very attractive and, to us, new phase of our question. The rising progression from front to rear was a matter of course, but how about the progression at right angles to it; from building to building, that is, of these three so nearly alike in size and dignity? To the passer-by along their Main Street front--the admiring passer-by, as we hope--should there be no augmentation of charm in the direction of his steps? And if there should be, then where and how ought it to show forth so as to avoid an anticlimax to one passing along the same front from the opposite direction? We promptly saw,--as the reader sees, no doubt, before we can tell it,--that what we wanted was two crescendos meeting somewhere near the middle; a crescendo passing into a diminuendo from whichever end you moved to the other--a swell. We saw that our loud-pedal effect should come upon "Middle Hall." So there, on its lucky bit of Greek porch, we bestowed the purple wistaria for spring, and for late summer that fragrant snowdrift, the clematis paniculata, so adapted as to festoon and chaplet, but never to smother, the Greek columns. On one of this structure's sides we planted forsythia, backed closer against the masonry by althaeas, with the low and exquisite mahonia (holly-leafed barberry) under its outer spread. On the other side of the house we placed, first, loniceras (bush honeysuckles); next, azaleas, in variety and profusion; then, toward the rear end, a mass of hardy hydrangeas (_Hydrangea paniculata grandiflora_), and at the very back of the pile another mass, of the flowering-quince (_Pyrus japonica_), with the trumpet-creeper (_Tecoma radicans_), to climb out of it.

About "North Hall," the third building, we planted more quietly, and most quietly on its outer, its northern, side where our lateral "swell" (rising effect) begins, or ends, according to the direction of your going, beginning with that modest but pretty bloomer the _Ligustrum ibota_, a perfectly hardy privet more graceful than the California (_ovalifolium_) species, which really has little business in icy New England away from the seashore.

I might have remarked before that nearly all the walls of these three buildings, as well as the gymnasium on the far side of the campus, were already adorned with the "Boston ivy" (_Ampelopsis Veitchii_). With the plantings thus described, and with the gymnasium surrounded by yet stronger greenery; with the back fence masked by willows, elders and red-stemmed cornus; and with a number of haphazard footpaths reduced to an equally convenient and far more graceful few, our scheme stands complete in its first, but only, please notice, its first, phase. The picture is submitted to your imagination not as it looked the day we ceased planting, but as we expected it to appear after a season or two, and as it does look now.

At present, rather tardily, we have begun to introduce herbaceous flowering perennials, which we ignored in the first part of our plan, because herbaceous plants are the flesh and blood and garments of a complete living and breathing garden; the walls, shrubs, trees, walks and drives are its bones. When this secondary phase has been more fully realized and we have placed bush-clumps and tree-clumps out on the open campus, and when our hundreds of cottage gardens are shaking off the prison irons of frost, we hope, if you cannot do us the honor to be with us bodily, your spirit may be near, aiding us on in the conquest of this ever beautiful Where-to-Plant-What problem, which I believe would make us a finer and happier nation if it could be expanded to national proportions.

THE COTTAGE GARDENS OF NORTHAMPTON

Adam and Eve, it is generally conceded, were precocious. They entered into the cares and joys of adult life at an earlier age than any later human prodigy. We call them the grand old gardener and his wife, but, in fact, they were the youngest gardeners the world has ever seen, and they really did not give entire satisfaction. How could they without tools?

Let it pass. The whole allusion is prompted only by the thought that youth does not spontaneously garden. If it was actually necessary that our first parents should begin life as gardeners, that fully explains why they had to begin it also as adults. Youth enjoys the garden, yes! but not its making or tending. Childhood, the abecedarian, may love to plant seeds, to watch them spring, grow, and flower, and to help them do so; but that is the merest a-b-c of gardening, and no more makes him an amateur in the art than spelling words of one letter makes him a poet. One may raise or love flowers for a lifetime, yet never in any art sense become a gardener.

In front of the main building of a public institution which we must presently mention again there is a sloping strip of sward a hundred feet long and some fifteen wide. A florist of fully half a century's experience one day halted beside it and exclaimed to the present writer, "Only say the word, and I'll set out the 'ole len'th o' that strip in foliage-plants a-spellin' o' the name: 'People's Hinstitute!'" Yet that gentle enthusiast advertised himself as a landscape-gardener and got clients. For who was there to tell them or him that he was not one?

Not only must we confess that youth does not spontaneously garden, but that our whole American civilization is still so lingeringly in its non-gardening youth that only now and then, here and there, does it realize that a florist, whether professional or amateur, or even a nurseryman, is not necessarily a constructive gardener, or that artistic gardening, however informal, is nine-tenths constructive.

Yet particularly because such gardening is so, and because some of its finest rewards are so slow-coming and long-abiding, there is no stage of life in which it is so reasonable for man or woman to love and practise the art as when youth is in its first full stature and may garden for itself and not merely for posterity. "John," said his aged father to one of our living poets, "I know now how to transplant full-grown trees successfully. Do it a long time ago." Let the stripling plant the sapling.

Youth, however, and especially our American youth, has his or her excuses, such as they are. Of the garden or the place to be gardened, "It's not mine," he or she warmly says; "it's only my father's," or "my mother's."

Young man! Young maiden! True, the place, so pathetically begging to be gardened, may not be your future home, may never be your property, and it is right enough that a feeling for ownership should begin to shape your daily life. But let it not misshape it. You know that ownership is not all of life nor the better half of it, and it is quite as good for you to give the fact due recognition by gardening early in life as it was for Adam and Eve.

It is better, for you can do so in a much more fortunate manner, having tools and the first pair's warning example. It is better also because you can do what to them was impossible; you can make gardening a concerted public movement.

That is what we have made it in Northampton, Massachusetts, whose curving streets and ancient elms you may have heard of as making it very garden-like in its mere layout; many of whose windows, piazzas, and hillside lawns look on across the beautiful Connecticut, winding broadly among its farmed meadows and vanishing southward through the towering gateway made for or by it millenniums ago between Mounts Tom and Holyoke.

There Smith College is, as well as that "People's Institute" aforementioned, and it is through that institute, one of whose several branches of work is carried on wholly by Smith College students, that we, the Northampton townspeople, established and maintain another branch, our concerted gardening.

A gathering on My Own Acre in the interest of the Flower Garden Competition.]

One evening in September a company of several hundred persons gathered in the main hall of the institute's "Carnegie House" to witness and receive the prize awards of their twelfth annual flower-garden competition.

The place was filled. A strong majority of those present were men and women who earn their daily bread with their hands. The whole population of Northampton is but twenty thousand or so, and the entire number of its voters hardly exceeds four thousand, yet there were one thousand and thirteen gardens in the competition, the gardens of that many homes; and although children had taken part in the care of many of them, and now were present to see the prizes go to their winners, not one was separately a child's garden. By a rule of the contest, each garden had been required to comprise the entire home lot, with the dwelling for its dominating feature and the family its spiritual unit.

The ceremony of award began with the lowest cash prize and moved steadily up to the second and first, these two being accompanied by brilliantly illuminated diplomas, and as each award was bestowed, the whole gathering of winners and non-winners--for no one could be called a loser--sounded their congratulations by a hearty clapping of hands. They had made the matter a public, concerted movement, and were interested in its results and rewards as spiritual proprietors in a common possession much wider than mere personal ownership under the law.

This wider sentiment of community, so valuable to the whole public interest, was further promoted by the combining of nearly two hundred of these same gardens in "neighborhood garden clubs" of seven or more gardens each, every garden in each club directly adjoining another, and the clubs competing for prizes of so much a garden to the best and second-best clubs.

Yet none the less for all this, but much more, a great majority of the multitude of home gardeners represented by this gathering were enjoying also--each home pair through their own home garden--the pleasures of personal ownership and achievement.

Many of the prize-winners were young, but many were gray, and some were even aged, yet all alike would have testified that even for age, and so all the more for youth, artistic flower-gardening is as self-rewarding a form of unselfish work and as promptly rewarding a mode of waiting on the future as can easily be found; that there is no more beautifully rewarding way by which youth may

"Learn to labor and to wait."

Maybe that is why Adam and Eve were apprenticed to it so very young.

It should have been said before that in advance of the award of prizes some very pleasant music and song were given from the platform by a few Smith College girls, and that then the company were shown stereopticon pictures of a number of their own gardens as they looked during the past summer and as they had looked when, a few years ago,--although seemingly but yesterday,--their owners began to plan and to plant.

The contrasts were amazing and lent great emphasis to the two or three truths we have here dwelt on probably long enough. To wit: first, that, as a rule, all true gardeners are grown-ups; second, that therein lies the finest value of concerted gardening; third, that the younger the grown-up the better, for the very reason that the crowning recompenses of true gardening come surely, but come late; and fourth, that, nevertheless, gardening yields a lovely amplitude of immediate rewards.

For instance, this gathering in our People's Institute also, before the announcement of prizes, took delight in hearing reported the aggregate of the flowers, mostly of that season's planting, distributed by a considerable number of the competitors to the shut-in and the bereaved. This feature of the movement had been begun only the previous year, and its total was no more than some three thousand dozens of flowers; but many grateful acknowledgments, both verbal and written, prove that it gave solace and joy to many hearts and we may call it a good beginning.

A garden should be owned not to be monopolized, but to be shared, as a song is owned not to be hushed, but to be sung; and the wide giving of its flowers is but one of several ways in which a garden may sing or be sung--for the garden is both song and singer. At any rate it cannot help but be a public benefaction and a public asset, if only its art be true.

Hence one of the values of our gardening in Northampton: making the gardens so many and so artistically true and good, it makes the town, as a whole, more interesting and pleasing to itself, and in corresponding degree the better to live in. Possibly there may be some further value in telling here how we do it.

As soon as signs of spring are plain to the general eye the visiting for enrolment begins. A secretary of the institute sets out to canvass such quarters of the field as have not been apportioned among themselves individually by the ladies composing the committee of "volunteer garden visitors." At the same time these ladies begin their calls, some undertaking more, some less, according to each one's willingness or ability.

This first round consists merely in enrolling the competitors by name, street, and number and in sending these registrations in to the institute. Later, by the same ladies, the same ground is more or less gone over again in visits of observation, inquiry and counsel, and once a month throughout the season the ladies meet together with the president of the institute to report the conditions and sentiments encountered and to plan further work.

The importance of these calls is not confined to the advancement of good gardening. They promote fellowship among neighbors and kind feeling between widely parted elements of society. Last year this committee made nearly eleven hundred such visits.

Meanwhile a circular letter has been early mailed to the previous year's competitors, urging them to re-enroll by post-card. Last year hundreds did so. Meanwhile, too, as soon as the enrolment is completed, the institute's general secretary begins a tour of official inspection, and as he is an experienced teacher of his art, his inspections are expert. His errand is known by the time he is in sight, and, as a rule, the householder joins him in a circuit of the place, showing achievements, reciting difficulties and disappointments, confessing errors, and taking tactful advice.

And what room he finds for tact! He sees a grave-like bed of verbenas defacing the middle of a small greensward--a dab of rouge on a young cheek; a pert child doing all the talking. Whereupon he shrewdly pleads not for the sward but for the flowers, "You have those there to show off at their best?"

"Yes. Don't they do it?"

"Not quite." He looks again. "Nine feet long--five wide. If you'll plant them next year in a foot-wide ribbon under that border of stronger things along your side boundary they'll give you at least forty feet of color instead of nine, and they'll illuminate your bit of sward instead of eclipsing it."

In another garden he says, "Splendid sunburst of color, that big tub of geraniums!" and the householder is pleased to admit the fact. "If you'd sink the tub into the ground clear down to the rim they'd take up no more room and they'd look natural. Besides, you wouldn't have to water them continually."

"That's true!" says the householder, quite in the incredible way of an old-fashioned book. "I'll do it!"

"And then," says the caller, "if you will set it away off on that far corner of the lawn it will shine clear across, showing everything between here and there, like a lighthouse across a harbor, or like a mirror, which you hang not in your parlor door, but at the far end of the room."

"When you come back you shall see it there," is the reply.

Sometimes, yet not often, a contestant is met who does not want advice, and who can hardly hide his scorn for book statements and experts. The present writer came upon one last year who "could not see what beauty there was in John Smith's garden, yet we had given him and his wife the capital prize!"

Frequently one finds the house of a competitor fast locked and dumb, its occupants being at work in some mill or shop. Then if the visit is one of official inspection a card stating that fact and dated and signed on the spot is left under the door, and on its reverse side the returning householder finds printed the following:

"In marking for merit your whole place is considered your garden. It is marked on four points: (1) Its layout, or ground plan; (2) its harmonies--of arrangement as to color of blooms and as to form and size of trees, shrubs and plants; (3) its condition--as to the neatness and order of everything; and (4) its duration--from how early in the year to how late it will make a pleasing show.

"Mow your lawn as often as the mower will cut the grass, but also keep it thoroughly weeded. As a rule, in laying out your plantings avoid straight lines and hard angles; the _double_ curve, or wave line, is the line of grace. Plant all the flowers you wish, few or many, but set shrubs at their back to give stronger and more lasting effects when the flowers are out of season as well as while they are in bloom.

"Try to plant so as to make your whole place one single picture of a _home_, with the house the chief element and the boundary-lines of the lot the frame. Plant on all your lot's boundaries, plant out the foundation-lines of all its buildings; but between these plantings keep the space grassed only, and open. In these house and boundary borders let your chief plantings be shrubs, and so have a nine months' instead of a three months' garden."

The secretary's tour completed and his score of all the gardens tabulated, a list is drawn from it of the one hundred and fifty best gardens, and a second circuit of counsel and inspection, limited to this greatly reduced number, is made by the president of the institute, who marks them again on the same four points of merit.

These two markings, averaged, determine the standing of all prize-winning gardens except the leading four. Then the president calls in one professional and one amateur expert, visits with them as many of the most promising contestants as can be seen in an afternoon's drive, and with them decides the award of the four highest prizes.

A secluded back corner of a prize-winner's garden which shows how slight a planting may redeem the homeliness of an old fence.]

A cheap apartment row whose landlord had its planting done by the People's Institute.]

That is all. When we have given two or three lesser items our story is told--for what it is worth. It is well to say we began small; in our first season, fifteen years ago, our whole roll of competitors numbered but sixty. It is the visiting that makes the difference; last season these visits, volunteer and official, were more than thirty-one hundred.

Another source of our success we believe to be the fact that our prizes are many and the leading ones large--fifteen, twelve, nine dollars, and so on down. Prizes and all, the whole movement costs a yearly cash outlay of less than three hundred dollars; without the People's Institute at its back it could still be done for five hundred.

And now, this being told in the hope that it may incite others, and especially youth, to make experiments like it elsewhere, to what impulse shall we appeal?

Will it not suffice if we invoke that adolescent instinct which moves us to merge our individual life--to consolidate it, as the stock-manipulators say--in the world's one great life, our "celestial selfishness" being intuitively assured that our own priceless individuality will gain, not lose, thereby?

Or shall we make our plea to an "art impulse"? No? Is the world already artificial enough? Not by half, although it is full, crammed, with the things the long-vanished dead have done for it in every art, from cameos to shade-trees; done for it because it was already so fair that, live long or die soon, they could not hold themselves back from making it fairer.

Yet, all that aside, is not this concerted gardening precisely such a work that young manhood and womanhood, however artificial or unartificial, anywhere, everywhere, Old World or newest frontier, ought to take to naturally? Adam and Eve did, and they--but we have squeezed Adam and Eve dry enough.

Patriotism! Can you imagine a young man or woman without it? And if you are young and a lover of your country, do you not love its physical aspects, "its rocks and rills, its woods and templed hills"? And if so, do you love only those parts of it which you never see and the appearance of which you have no power to modify? Or do you love the land only and not the people, the nation, the government? Or, loving these, have you no love for the nearest public fraction of it, your own town and neighbors? Why, then, your love of the Stars and Stripes is the flattest, silliest idolatry; so flat and silly it is hardly worth chiding. Your patriotism is a patriotism for war only, and a country with only that kind is never long without war.

You see the difference? Patriotism for war generalizes. A patriotism for peace particularizes, localizes. Ah, you do love, despite all their faults, your nation, your government, your town and townspeople, else you would not so often scold them! Otherwise, why do you let us call them yours? Because they belong to you? No, because you belong to them. Beyond cavil you are your own, but beyond cavil, too, you are theirs; their purchased possession, paid for long, long in advance and sight-unseen.

You cannot use a sidewalk, a street-lamp, or a post-box, or slip away into the woods and find them cleared of savages and deadly serpents, without seeing part of the price paid for you before your great-grandfather was born. So, then, loving your town enough to scold it, you will also serve it!

Now this we say not so much to be preaching as to bring in a last word descriptive of our Northampton movement. We do not make that work a mere aggregation of private kindnesses, but a public business for the promotion of the town in sanitary upkeep, beauty and civic fellowship.

And so our aim is not chiefly to reward the highest art in gardening, but to procure its widest and most general dissemination. The individual is definitely subordinated to the community's undivided interest. Since gardening tends to develop in fortunate sections and to die out in others, we have laid off our town map in seven parts and made a rule that to each of these shall go three of the prizes.

Moreover, no two consecutive prizes can be awarded in any one of these districts. Where a competitor takes the capital prize no other can take a higher than the third, and if two in one district win the first and third prizes no one else there can take a higher than the fifth. So on through to prize twenty-one.

Still further, a garden taking any of these prizes can never again take any of them but a higher one, and those who attain to the capital prize are thenceforth _hors concours_ except to strive for the "Past Competitors' Prizes," first and second.

Thus the seasons come and go, the gardens wake, rise, rejoice and slumber again; and because this arrangement is so evidently for the common weal and fellowship first, and yet leaves personal ownership all its liberties, rights and delights, it is cordially accepted of the whole people. And, lastly, as a certain dear lady whom we may not more closely specify exclaimed when, to her glad surprise, she easily turned the ceremonial golden key which first unlocked the Carnegie House of our People's Institute, "It works!"

THE PRIVATE GARDEN'S PUBLIC VALUE

What its pages are to a book, a town's private households are to a town.

No true home, standing solitarily apart from the town (unbound, as it were) could be the blessed thing it is were there not so many other houses not standing apart but gathered into villages, towns and cities.

Whence comes civilization but from _civitas_, the city? And where did _civitas_ get its name, when city and state were one, but from citizen? He is not named for the city but the city for him, and his title meant first the head of a household, the master of a home. To make a civilization, great numbers of men must have homes, must mass them compactly together and must not mass them together on a dead level of equal material equipment but in a confederation of homes of all ranks and conditions.

The home is the cornerstone of the state.

The town, the organized assemblage of homes, is the keystone of civilization's arch.

In order to keep our whole civilization moving on and up, _which is the only way for home and town to pay to each other their endless spiral of reciprocal indebtedness_, every home in a town--or state, for that matter--should be made as truly and fully a home as every wise effort and kind influence of all the other homes can make it. Unless it takes part in this effort and influence, no home, be it ever so favored, can realize, even for itself and in itself, the finest civilization it might attain. Why should it? I believe this is a moral duty, a debt as real as taxes and very much like them.

In our People's Institute over in Northampton, Massachusetts, this is the a-b-c of all they seek to do: the individual tutoring, by college girls and town residents, of hundreds of young working men and women in whatever these may choose from among a score or so of light studies calculated to refine their aspirations; the training of young girls, by paid experts, in the arts of the home, from cooking to embroidery; the training of both sexes in all the social amenities; and the enlistment of more than a thousand cottage homes in a yearly prize competition.

It is particularly of this happy garden contest that I wish to say a word or two more. In 1914 it completed its sixteenth season, but it is modelled on a much older one in the town of Dunfermline, Scotland, the birthplace of Mr. Andrew Carnegie, and it is from the bountiful spirit of that great citizen of two lands that both affairs draw at least one vital element of their existence.

We in Northampton first learned of the Dunfermline movement in 1898. We saw at once how strongly such a scheme might promote the general spiritual enrichment of our working people's homes if made one of the functions of our home-culture clubs, several features of whose work were already from five to ten years old. We proceeded to adopt and adapt the plan, and had our first competition and award of prizes in 1898-'99.

Like Dunfermline, we made our prizes large, and to this we attribute no small part of our success. When we saw fit to increase their number we increased the total outlay as well, and at present we award twenty-one prizes a year, the highest being fifteen dollars, and one hundred dollars the sum of the whole twenty-one prizes. So we have gained one of our main purposes: to tempt into the contest the man of the house and thus to stimulate in him that care and pride of his home, the decline of which, in the man of the house, is one of the costliest losses of hard living.

One day on their round of inspection our garden judges came to a small house at the edge of the town, near the top of a hill through which the rustic street cuts its way some twelve or fifteen feet below. The air was pure, the surroundings green, the prospect wide and lovely. Here was a rare chance for picturesque gardening. Although the yard was without a fence there had been some planting of flowers in it. Yet it could hardly be called a garden. So destitute was it of any intelligent plan and so uncared for that it seemed almost to have a conscious, awkward self-contempt. In the flecked shade of a rude trellis of grapes that sheltered a side door two children of the household fell to work with great parade at a small machine, setting bristles into tooth-brushes for a neighboring factory, but it was amusingly plain that their labor was spasmodic and capricious.

The mother was away on a business errand. The father was present. He had done his day's stint in the cutlery works very early, and with five hours of sunlight yet before him had no use to make of them but to sit on a bowlder on the crest of the pleasant hill and smoke and whittle. Had he been mentally trained he might, without leaving that stone, have turned those hours into real living, communing with nature and his own mind; but he had, as half an eye could see, no developed powers of observation, reflection or imagination, and probably, for sheer want of practice, could not have fixed his attention on a worthy book through five of its pages. The question that arose in the minds of his visitors comes again here: what could have been so good to keep idleness from breeding its swarm of evils in his brain and hands--and home--as for somebody, something, somehow, to put it into his head--well--for example--to make a garden? A garden, we will say, that should win a prize, and--even though it failed to win--should render him and his house and household more interesting to himself, his neighbors and his town.

He and his house seemed to be keeping the Ten Commandments in a slouching sort of way and we may even suppose they were out of debt--money debt; yet already they were an unconscious menace to society; their wage-earning powers had outgrown their wants. Outgrown them not because the wages were too high but because their wants were too low; were only wants of the body, wants of the barrenest unculture; _the inelastic wants_.

That is "my own invention," that phrase! The bodily wants of a reptile are elastic. If an alligator or a boa-constrictor catches a dog he can swallow him whole and enjoy that one meal in unriotous bliss for weeks. Thereafter if he must put up with no more than a minnow or a mouse he can do that for weeks in unriotous patience. In a spring in one of our Northampton gardens I saw a catfish swallow a frog so big that the hind toes stuck out of the devourer's mouth for four days; but they went in at last, and the fish, in his fishy fashion, from start to finish was happy. He was never demoralized. It is not so with us. We cannot much distend or contract our purely physical needs. Especially is any oversupply of them mischievous. They have not the reptilian elasticity. Day by day they must have just enough. But the civilized man has spiritual wants and they are as elastic as air.

A home is a house well filled with these elastic wants. Home-culture is getting such wants into households--not merely into single individuals--that lack them. What makes a man rich? Is the term merely comparative? Not merely. To be rich is to have, beyond the demands of our bodily needs, abundant means to supply our spiritual wants. To possess more material resources than we can or will use or bestow to the spiritual advantage of ourselves and others is to be perilously rich, whether we belong to a grinders' union in the cutlery works or to a royal family. Why is it so often right that a rich college, for example, should, in its money-chest, feel poor? Because it could so easily supply more spiritual wants if it had more money.

Not low wages will ever make men harmless, nor high wages make them happy, nor low nor high save them from a spirit of pauperism or of malignant envy; but having wages bigger than their bodily wants, and having spiritual wants numerous and elastic enough to use up the surplus--spiritual wants, that know both how to suffer need and how to abound, and to do either without backsliding toward savagery. Whoever would help this state of things on, let him seek at the same time to increase the home's wage-earning power and its spiritual powers to put to fine use the wages earned: to augment the love of beauty in nature and in art, the love of truth and knowledge, the love of achievement and of service, the love of God and of human society, the ambition to put more into the world than we get out of it. Wages will never be too high, nor the hours of a day's work too many or too few, which follow that "sliding scale." How much our garden contest may do of this sort for that cottage on the hill we have yet to know; last year was its first in the competition. But it has shown the ambition to enter the lists, and a number that promised no more at the outset have since won prizes. One such was so beautiful last year that strangers driving by stopped and asked leave to dismount and enjoy a nearer view.

The owner of this cottage, who stands on the lawn, spaded and graded it and grassed it herself, and by shrubbery plantings about the house's foundation and on the outer boundaries of the grass has so transformed it since this picture was taken as to win one of the highest prizes awarded among more than a thousand competitors.]

A capital prize-winner's back yard which was a sand bank when he entered the competition. His front yard is still handsomer.]

A certain garden to which we early awarded a high prize was, and yet remains, among the loveliest in Northampton. Its house stands perhaps seventy feet back from the public way and so nearly at one edge of its broad lot that all its exits and entrances are away from that side and toward the garden. A lawn and front bordered on side by loose hedges of Regel's privet and Thunberg's barberry and with only one or two slim trees of delicate foliage near its street line, rises slightly from the sidewalk to the house in a smooth half wave that never sinks below any level it has attained and yet consists of two curves. (It takes two curves, let us say once more, to make even half of the gentlest wave that can be made, if you take it from the middle of the crest to the middle of the trough, and in our American gardening thousands of lawns, especially small front lawns, are spoiled in their first layout by being sloped in a single curve instead of in two curves bending opposite ways.) Along a side of this greensward farthest from the boundary to which the house is so closely set are the drive and walk, in one, and on the farther side of these, next the sun, is the main flower-garden, half surrounding another and smaller piece of lawn. The dwelling stands endwise to the street and broadside to this expanse of bloom. Against its front foundations lies a bed of flowering shrubs which at the corner farthest from the drive swings away along that side's boundary line and borders it with shrubbery down to the street, the main feature of the group being a luxuriant flowering quince as large as ten ordinary ones and in every springtime a red splendor.

But the focus of the gardening scheme is at the southeasterly side entrance of the house. To this the drive comes on unrigorous lines from the street. The walk curves away a few steps earlier to go to the front door but the drive, passing on, swings in under the rear corner windows and to the kitchen steps, veers around by the carriage-house door and so loops back into itself. In this loop, and all about the bases of the dwelling and carriage-house the flowers rise in dense abundance, related to one another with clever taste and with a happy care for a procession of bloom uninterrupted throughout the season. Straightaway from the side door, leaving the drive at a right angle, runs a short arbor of vines. Four or five steps to the left of this bower a clump of shrubbery veils the view from the street and in between shrubs and arbor lies a small pool of water flowers and goldfish. On the arbor's right, in charming privacy, masked by hollyhocks, dahlias and other tall-maidenly things, lie beds of strawberries and lettuce and all the prim ranks and orders of the kitchen garden.

Words are poor things to paint with; I wish I could set forth all in one clear picture: lawn, drive, house, loop, lily pond, bower, rose-bordered drive again (as the eye comes back) and flowers crowding before, behind and beside you, some following clear out to the street and beseeching you not to go so soon. Such is the garden, kept without hired labor, of two soft-handed women; not beyond criticism in any of its aspects but bearing witness to their love of nature, of beauty and of home and of their wisdom and skill to exalt and refine them.

This competitor early won, I say, a leading prize, and in later seasons easily held--still holds--a fine pre-eminence. Yet the later prizes fell to others, because, while this one had been a beautiful garden for years before the competition began, they, rising from much newer and humbler beginnings, sometimes from very chaos, showed between one season and the next far greater advances _toward_ artistic excellence. In the very next year a high prize fell to a garden in full sight of this one, a garden whose makers had caught their inspiration from this one, and, copying its art, had brought forth a charming result out of what our judges described as "particularly forlorn conditions."

Does this seem hardly fair to the first garden? But to spread the gardening contagion and to instigate a wise copying after the right gardeners--these are what our prizes and honors are for. Progress first, perfection afterward, is our maxim. We value and reward originality, nevertheless, and only count it a stronger necessity to see not merely that no talented or happily circumstanced few, but that not even any one or two fortunate neighborhoods, shall presently be capturing all the prizes. Hence the rules already cited, which a prompt discovery of this tendency forced upon us.

About this copying: no art is more inoffensively imitated than gardening but unluckily none is more easily, or more absurdly, miscopied. A safe way is to copy the gardener rather than the garden. To copy any performance in a way to do it honor we must discern and adapt its art without mimicking its act. To miscopy is far easier--we have only to mimic the act and murder the art. I once heard a man ask an architect if it would not answer to give his plan to the contractor and let him work it out without the architect's supervision.

"My dear sir," the architect replied, "you wouldn't know the corpse."

I suppose one reason why even the miscopying of gardens provokes so little offence is that the acts it mimics have no art it can murder. Mrs. Budd sets out her one little "high geraingia" in the middle of her tiny grass-plat (probably trimming it to look like a ballet-dancer on one leg). Whereupon Mrs. Mudd, the situation of whose house and grounds is not in the least like her neighbor's, plants and trims hers the same way and feels sure it has the same effect, for--why shouldn't it?

The prize-winning copyist I am telling of copied principles only. To have copied mere performance would have been particularly unlucky, for though his garden stands within fifty yards of the one from which it drew its inspiration the two are so differently located that the same art principles demand of them very different performances. An old-time lover of gardens whom I have to quote at second-hand mentions in contrast "gardens to look in upon" and "gardens to look out from." The garden I have described at length is planned to be looked in upon; most town gardens must be, of course; but its competitor across the street, of which I am about to give account, is an exception. The lot has a very broad front and very little depth--at one side almost none, at the other barely enough for a small house and a few feet of front yard. Why there should be a drive I cannot say, but it is so well taken into the general scheme that to call it to account would be ungenerous. It enters at the narrowest part of the ground, farthest from the house, makes a long parabola, and turns again into the street close beside the dwelling. In the bit of lawn thus marked off, shrubs have place near the street, three or four old apple-trees range down the middle, and along the drive runs a gay border of annual flowers. Along the rear side of the drive lies but a narrow strip of turf beyond which the ground drops all at once to another level some thirty feet below. On the right this fall is so abrupt that the only way down to it is by a steep rustic stair. On the left, behind the house, the face of the bluff is broken into narrow terraces, from top to bottom of which, and well out on the lower level, the entire space is mantled with the richly burdened trellises of a small vineyard. At the right on this lower ground is a kitchen garden; beyond it stretch fair meadows too low to build on, but fruitful in hay and grain; farther away, on higher ground, the town again shows its gables and steeples among its great maples and elms, and still beyond, some three miles distant, the green domes and brown precipices of the Mount Holyoke Range stand across the sky in sharp billows of forest and rock. It seems at times a pity that Mount Holyoke and Mount Tom cannot themselves know how many modest gardens they are a component part of--the high violin note of: gardens, like this one, "to look out from."

It stops one's pen for one to find himself using the same phrases for these New England cottage gardens that famous travellers have used in telling of the gardens of Italian princes; yet why should we not, when the one nature and the one art are mother and godmother of them all? It is a laughing wonder what beauty can be called into life about the most unpretentious domicile, out of what ugliness such beauty can be evoked and at how trivial a cost in money. Three years before this "garden to look out from" won its Carnegie prize it was for the most part a rubbish heap. Let me now tell of one other, that sprang from conditions still more unlovely because cramped and shut in.