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.

[Illustration: "You can make gardening a concerted public movement."

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 major