ame of it points the fact that really
artistic gardening is not democratically general with us.

Our cities and towns, without number, have the architect and the
engineer, for house and for landscape, for sky-scrapers and all manner
of public works; we have the nurseryman, the florist; we have parks,
shaded boulevards and riverside and lakeside drives. Under private
ownership we have a vast multitude of exactly rectilinear lawns,
extremely bare or else very badly planted; and we have hundreds of
thousands of beautiful dames and girls who "love flowers." But our home
gardens, our home gardeners, either professional or amateur, where are
they? Our smaller cities by scores and our towns by hundreds are full of
home-dwellers each privately puzzled to know why every one of his
neighbors' houses, however respectable in architecture, stares at him
and after him with a vacant, deaf-mute air of having just landed in this
country, without friends.

What ails these dwellings is largely lack of true gardening. They will
never look like homes, never look really human and benign, that is,
until they are set in a gardening worthy of them. For a garden which
alike in its dignity and in its modesty is worthy of the house around
which it is set, is the smile of the place.

In the small city of Northampton, Massachusetts, there has been for many
years an annual prize competition of amateur flower-gardens. In 1913
there were over a thousand homes, about one-fourth of all the dwellings
in the town, in this pretty contest. Not all, not half, these
competitors could make a show worthy the name of good gardening, but
every one of these households stood pledged to do something during the
year for the outdoor improvement of the home, and hundreds of their
house lots were florally beautiful. If I seem to hurry into a mention of
it here it is partly in the notion that such a recital may be my best
credentials as the writer of these pages, and partly in the notion that
such a concrete example may possibly have a tendency to help on
flower-gardening in the country at large and even to aid us in
determining what American flower-gardening had best be.

For the reader's better advantage, however, let me first state one or
two general ideas which have given this activity and its picturesque
results particular aspects and not others.

I lately heard a lady ask an amateur gardener, "What is the garden's
foundation principle?"

There was a certain o