undreds 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