led
flower-gardeners, either professional or amateur.

[Illustration: "Plant it where it will best enjoy itself."

These wild roses are in two clumps with a six-foot open way between
them. They are a wild rose (_Rosa Arkansana_) not much in use but worthy
of more attention, as indeed all the wild roses are. The sunlit tree
farthest on the right is Sol Smith Russell's linden.]

As the present century was coming in, however, the opportunity, through
private flower-gardening, to double or quadruple the town's beauty and
to do it without great trouble or expense, yet with great individual
delight and social pleasure, came to the lively notice of a number of
us. It is, then, for the promotion of this object throughout all our
bounds, and not for the perfection of the art for its own sake, that we
maintain this competition and award these "Carnegie" prizes. Hence
certain features of our method the value and necessity of which might
not be clear to the casual inquirer without this explanation.

May I repeat it? Not to reward two or three persons yearly for reaching
some dizzy peak of art unattainable by ordinary taste and skill, nor to
reward one part of the town or one element of its people for gardening
better than another, nor to promote the production of individual plants
or flowers of extraordinary splendor, nor even to incite children to
raise patches of flowers, is our design; but to make the modest and
democratic art of Where to Plant What (an art, nevertheless, quite
beyond the grasp of children) so well known and so valued that its
practical adoption shall overrun the whole town.

To this end we have divided our field into seven districts, in each of
which the number of gardens is about the same. In each of these seven
districts only three prizes (out of twenty-one) may be taken in any one
season. Consequently three prizes _must_ fall to each district every
year. Yet the best garden of all still carries off the capital prize,
the second-best may win the second, and cannot take a lower than the
third, and the lowest awards go into the district showing the poorest
results. Even this plan is so modified as further to stimulate those who
strive against odds of location or conditions, for no district is
allowed to receive two prizes consecutive in the list. The second prize
cannot be bestowed in the same district in which the first is being
awarded, though the third can. The third cannot go into the same
district as