r and definite instructions
that will enable them to work intelligently. I have written from
personal experience in the various phases of gardening upon which I have
touched in this book. I am quite confident that the information given
will stand the test of most thorough trial. What I have done with the
various plants I speak of, others can do if they set about it in the
right way, and with the determination of succeeding. The will will find
the way to success. I would not be understood as intending to convey the
impression that I consider my way as _the_ way. By no means. Others have
accomplished the same results by different methods. I simply tell what I
have done, and how I have done it, and leave it to the home-maker to be
governed by the results of my experience or that of others who have
worked toward the same end. We may differ in methods, but the outcome
is, in most instances, the same. I have written from the standpoint of
the amateur, for other amateurs who would make the improvement of the
home-grounds a pleasure and a means of relaxation rather than a source
of profit in a financial sense, believing that what I have to say will
commend itself to the non-professional gardener as sensible, practical,
and helpful, and strictly in line with the things he needs to know when
he gets down to actual work.

I have also tried to make it plain that much of which goes to the making
of the home is not out of reach of the man of humble means--that it is
possible for the laboring man to have a home as truly beautiful in the
best sense of the term as the man can have who has any amount of money
to spend--that it is not the money that we put into it that counts so
much as _the love for it_ and the desire to take advantage of every
chance for improvement. Home, for home's sake, is the idea that should
govern. Money can hire the work done, but it cannot infuse into the
result the satisfaction that comes to the man who is his own home-maker.

But not every person who reads this book will be a home-maker in the
sense spoken of above. It will come into the hands of those who have
homes about which improvements have already been made by themselves or
others, but who take delight in the cultivation of shrubs and plants
because of love for them. Many of these persons get a great deal of
pleasure out of experimenting with them. Others do not care to spend
time in experiments, but would be glad to find a short cut to success.
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