steadily up to the second and first, these two being accompanied by
brilliantly illuminated diplomas, and as each award was bestowed, the
whole gathering of winners and non-winners--for no one could be called a
loser--sounded their congratulations by a hearty clapping of hands. They
had made the matter a public, concerted movement, and were interested in
its results and rewards as spiritual proprietors in a common possession
much wider than mere personal ownership under the law.
This wider sentiment of community, so valuable to the whole public
interest, was further promoted by the combining of nearly two hundred of
these same gardens in "neighborhood garden clubs" of seven or more
gardens each, every garden in each club directly adjoining another, and
the clubs competing for prizes of so much a garden to the best and
second-best clubs.
Yet none the less for all this, but much more, a great majority of the
multitude of home gardeners represented by this gathering were enjoying
also--each home pair through their own home garden--the pleasures of
personal ownership and achievement.
Many of the prize-winners were young, but many were gray, and some were
even aged, yet all alike would have testified that even for age, and so
all the more for youth, artistic flower-gardening is as self-rewarding a
form of unselfish work and as promptly rewarding a mode of waiting on
the future as can easily be found; that there is no more beautifully
rewarding way by which youth may
"Learn to labor and to wait."
Maybe that is why Adam and Eve were apprenticed to it so very young.
It should have been said before that in advance of the award of prizes
some very pleasant music and song were given from the platform by a few
Smith College girls, and that then the company were shown stereopticon
pictures of a number of their own gardens as they looked during the past
summer and as they had looked when, a few years ago,--although seemingly
but yesterday,--their owners began to plan and to plant.
The contrasts were amazing and lent great emphasis to the two or three
truths we have here dwelt on probably long enough. To wit: first, that,
as a rule, all true gardeners are grown-ups; second, that therein lies
the finest value of concerted gardening; third, that the younger the
grown-up the better, for the very reason that the crowning recompenses
of true gardening come surely, but come late; and fourth, that,
nevertheless, gardening yields a lovely amplitude of immediate rewards.
For instance, this gathering in our People's Institute also, before the
announcement of prizes, took delight in hearing reported the aggregate
of the flowers, mostly of that season's planting, distributed by a
considerable number of the competitors to the shut-in and the bereaved.
This feature of the movement had been begun only the previous year, and
its total was no more than some three thousand dozens of flowers; but
many grateful acknowledgments, both verbal and written, prove that it
gave solace and joy to many hearts and we may call it a good beginning.
A garden should be owned not to be monopolized, but to be shared, as a
song is owned not to be hushed, but to be sung; and the wide giving of
its flowers is but one of several ways in which a garden may sing or be
sung--for the garden is both song and singer. At any rate it cannot help
but be a public benefaction and a public asset, if only its art be true.
Hence one of the values of our gardening in Northampton: making the
gardens so many and so artistically true and good, it makes the town, as
a whole, more interesting and pleasing to itself, and in corresponding
degree the better to live in. Possibly there may be some further value
in telling here how we do it.
As soon as signs of spring are plain to the general eye the visiting for
enrolment begins. A secretary of the institute sets out to canvass such
quarters of the field as have not been apportioned among themselves
individually by the ladies composing the committee of "volunteer garden
visitors." At the same time these ladies begin their calls, some
undertaking more, some less, according to each one's willingness or
ability.
This first round consists merely in enrolling the competitors by name,
street, and number and in sending these registrations in to the
institute. Later, by the same ladies, the same ground is more or less
gone over again in visits of observation, inquiry and counsel, and once
a month throughout the season the ladies meet together with the
president of the institute to report the conditions and sentiments
encountered and to plan further work.
The importance of these calls is not confined to the advancement of good
gardening. They promote fellowship among neighbors and kind feeling
between widely parted elements of society. Last year this committee made
nearly eleven hundred such visits.
Meanwhile a circular letter has been early mailed to the previous year's
competitors, urging them to re-enroll by post-card. Last year hundreds
did so. Meanwhile, too, as soon as the enrolment is completed, the
institute's general secretary begins a tour of official inspection, and
as he is an experienced teacher of his art, his inspections are expert.
His errand is known by the time he is in sight, and, as a rule, the
householder joins him in a circuit of the place, showing achievements,
reciting difficulties and disappointments, confessing errors, and taking
tactful advice.
And what room he finds for tact! He sees a grave-like bed of verbenas
defacing the middle of a small greensward--a dab of rouge on a young
cheek; a pert child doing all the talking. Whereupon he shrewdly pleads
not for the sward but for the flowers, "You have those there to show off
at their best?"
"Yes. Don't they do it?"
"Not quite." He looks again. "Nine feet long--five wide. If you'll plant
them next year in a foot-wide ribbon under that border of stronger
things along your side boundary they'll give you at least forty feet of
color instead of nine, and they'll illuminate your bit of sward instead
of eclipsing it."
In another garden he says, "Splendid sunburst of color, that big tub of
geraniums!" and the householder is pleased to admit the fact. "If you'd
sink the tub into the ground clear down to the rim they'd take up no
more room and they'd look natural. Besides, you wouldn't have to water
them continually."
"That's true!" says the householder, quite in the incredible way of an
old-fashioned book. "I'll do it!"
"And then," says the caller, "if you will set it away off on that far
corner of the lawn it will shine clear across, showing everything
between here and there, like a lighthouse across a harbor, or like a
mirror, which you hang not in your parlor door, but at the far end of
the room."
"When you come back you shall see it there," is the reply.
Sometimes, yet not often, a contestant is met who does not want advice,
and who can hardly hide his scorn for book statements and experts. The
present writer came upon one last year who "could not see what beauty
there was in John Smith's garden, yet we had given him and his wife the
capital prize!"
Frequently one finds the house of a competitor fast locked and dumb, its
occupants being at work in some mill or shop. Then if the visit is one
of official inspection a card stating that fact and dated and signed on
the spot is left under the door, and on its reverse side the returning
householder finds printed the following:
"In marking for merit your whole place is considered your garden. It is
marked on four points: (1) Its layout, or ground plan; (2) its
harmonies--of arrangement as to color of blooms and as to form and size
of trees, shrubs and plants; (3) its condition--as to the neatness and
order of everything; and (4) its duration--from how early in the year to
how late it will make a pleasing show.
"Mow your lawn as often as the mower will cut the grass, but also keep
it thoroughly weeded. As a rule, in laying out your plantings avoid
straight lines and hard angles; the _double_ curve, or wave line, is the
line of grace. Plant all the flowers you wish, few or many, but set
shrubs at their back to give stronger and more lasting effects when the
flowers are out of season as well as while they are in bloom.
"Try to plant so as to make your whole place one single picture of a
_home_, with the house the chief element and the boundary-lines of the
lot the frame. Plant on all your lot's boundaries, plant out the
foundation-lines of all its buildings; but between these plantings keep
the space grassed only, and open. In these house and boundary borders
let your chief plantings be shrubs, and so have a nine months' instead
of a three months' garden."
The secretary's tour completed and his score of all the gardens
tabulated, a list is drawn from it of the one hundred and fifty best
gardens, and a second circuit of counsel and inspection, limited to this
greatly reduced number, is made by the president of the institute, who
marks them again on the same four points of merit.
These two markings, averaged, determine the standing of all
prize-winning gardens except the leading four. Then the president calls
in one professional and one amateur expert, visits with them as many of
the most promising contestants as can be seen in an afternoon's drive,
and with them decides the award of the four highest prizes.
[Illustration: "Plant on all your lot's boundaries, plant out the
foundation-lines of all its buildings."
A secluded back corner of a prize-winner's garden which shows how slight
a planting may redeem the homeliness of an old fence.]
[Illustration: "Not chiefly to reward the highest art in gardening, but
to procure its widest and most general dissemination."
A cheap apartment row whose landlord had its planting done by the
People's Institute.]
That is all. When we have given two or three lesser items our story is
told--for what it is worth. It is well to say we began small; in our
first season, fifteen years ago, our whole roll of competitors numbered
but sixty. It is the visiting that makes the difference; last season
these visits, volunteer and official, were more than thirty-one hundred.
Another source of our success we believe to be the fact that our prizes
are many and the leading ones large--fifteen, twelve, nine dollars, and
so on down. Prizes and all, the whole movement costs a yearly cash
outlay of less than three hundred dollars; without the People's
Institute at its back it could still be done for five hundred.
And now, this being told in the hope that it may incite others, and
especially youth, to make experiments like it elsewhere, to what impulse
shall we appeal?
Will it not suffice if we invoke that adolescent instinct which moves us
to merge our individual life--to consolidate it, as the
stock-manipulators say--in the world's one great life, our "celestial
selfishness" being intuitively assured that our own priceless
individuality will gain, not lose, thereby?
Or shall we make our plea to an "art impulse"? No? Is the world already
artificial enough? Not by half, although it is full, crammed, with the
things the long-vanished dead have done for it in every art, from cameos
to shade-trees; done for it because it was already so fair that, live
long or die soon, they could not hold themselves back from making it
fairer.
Yet, all that aside, is not this concerted gardening precisely such a
work that young manhood and womanhood, however artificial or
unartificial, anywhere, everywhere, Old World or newest frontier, ought
to take to naturally? Adam and Eve did, and they--but we have squeezed
Adam and Eve dry enough.
Patriotism! Can you imagine a young man or woman without it? And if you
are young and a lover of your country, do you not love its physical
aspects, "its rocks and rills, its woods and templed hills"? And if so,
do you love only those parts of it which you never see and the
appearance of which you have no power to modify? Or do you love the land
only and not the people, the nation, the government? Or, loving these,
have you no love for the nearest public fraction of it, your own town
and neighbors? Why, then, your love of the Stars and Stripes is the
flattest, silliest idolatry; so flat and silly it is hardly worth
chiding. Your patriotism is a patriotism for war only, and a country
with only that kind is never long without war.
You see the difference? Patriotism for war generalizes. A patriotism for
peace particularizes, localizes. Ah, you do love, despite all their
faults, your nation, your government, your town and townspeople, else
you would not so often scold them! Otherwise, why do you let us call
them yours? Because they belong to you? No, because you belong to them.
Beyond cavil you are your own, but beyond cavil, too, you are theirs;
their purchased possession, paid for long, long in advance and
sight-unseen.
You cannot use a sidewalk, a street-lamp, or a post-box, or slip away
into the woods and find them cleared of savages and deadly serpents,
without seeing part of the price paid for you before your
great-grandfather was born. So, then, loving your town enough to scold
it, you will also serve it!
Now this we say not so much to be preaching as to bring in a last word
descriptive of our Northampton movement. We do not make that work a mere
aggregation of private kindnesses, but a public business for the
promotion of the town in sanitary upkeep, beauty and civic fellowship.
And so our aim is not chiefly to reward the highest art in gardening,
but to procure its widest and most general dissemination. The individual
is definitely subordinated to the community's undivided interest. Since
gardening tends to develop in fortunate sections and to die out in
others, we have laid off our town map in seven parts and made a rule
that to each of these shall go three of the prizes.
Moreover, no two consecutive prizes can be awarded in any one of these
districts. Where a competitor takes the capital prize no other can take
a higher than the third, and if two in one district win the first and
third prizes no one else there can take a higher than the fifth. So on
through to prize twenty-one.
Still further, a garden taking any of these prizes can never again take
any of them but a higher one, and those who attain to the capital prize
are thenceforth _hors concours_ except to strive for the "Past
Competitors' Prizes," first and second.
Thus the seasons come and go, the gardens wake, rise, rejoice and
slumber again; and because this arrangement is so evidently for the
common weal and fellowship first, and yet leaves personal ownership all
its liberties, rights and delights, it is cordially accepted of the
whole people. And, lastly, as a certain dear lady whom we may not more
closely specify exclaimed when, to her glad surprise, she easily turned
the ceremonial golden key which first unlocked the Carnegie House of our
People's Institute, "It works!"
THE PRIVATE GARDEN'S PUBLIC VALUE
What its pages are to a book, a town's private households are to a town.
No true home, standing solitarily apart from the town (unbound, as it
were) could be the blessed thing it is were there not so many other
houses not standing apart but gathered into villages, towns and cities.
Whence comes civilization but from _civitas_, the city? And where did
_civitas_ get its name, when city and state were one, but from citizen?
He is not named for the city but the city for him, and his title meant
first the head of a household, the master of a home. To make a
civilization, great numbers of men must have homes, must mass them
compactly together and must not mass them together on a dead level of
equal material equipment but in a confederation of homes of all ranks
and conditions.
The home is the cornerstone of the state.
The town, the organized assemblage of homes, is the keystone of
civilization's arch.
In order to keep our whole civilization moving on and up, _which is the
only way for home and town to pay to each other their endless spiral of
reciprocal indebtedness_, every home in a town--or state, for that
matter--should be made as truly and fully a home as every wise effort
and kind influence of all the other homes can make it. Unless it takes
part in this effort and influence, no home, be it ever so favored, can
realize, even for itself and in itself, the finest civilization it might
attain. Why should it? I believe this is a moral duty, a debt as real as
taxes and very much like them.
In our People's Institute over in Northampton, Massachusetts, this is
the a-b-c of all they seek to do: the individual tutoring, by college
girls and town residents, of hundreds of young working men and women in
whatever these may choose from among a score or so of light studies
calculated to refine their aspirations; the training of young girls, by
paid experts, in the arts of the home, from cooking to embroidery; the
training of both sexes in all the social amenities; and the enlistment
of more than a thousand cottage homes in a yearly prize competition.
It is particularly of this happy garden contest that I wish to say a
word or two more. In 1914 it completed its sixteenth season, but it is
modelled on a much older one in the town of Dunfermline, Scotland, the
birthplace of Mr. Andrew Carnegie, and it is from the bountiful spirit
of that great citizen of two lands that both affairs draw at least one
vital element of their existence.
We in Northampton first learned of the Dunfermline movement in 1898. We
saw at once how strongly such a scheme might promote the general
spiritual enrichment of our working people's homes if made one of the
functions of our home-culture clubs, several features of whose work were
already from five to ten years old. We proceeded to adopt and adapt the
plan, and had our first competition and award of prizes in 1898-'99.
Like Dunfermline, we made our prizes large, and to this we attribute no
small part of our success. When we saw fit to increase their number we
increased the total outlay as well, and at present we award twenty-one
prizes a year, the highest being fifteen dollars, and one hundred
dollars the sum of the whole twenty-one prizes. So we have gained one of
our main purposes: to tempt into the contest the man of the house and
thus to stimulate in him that care and pride of his home, the decline of
which, in the man of the house, is one of the costliest losses of hard
living.
One day on their round of inspection our garden judges came to a small
house at the edge of the town, near the top of a hill through which the
rustic street cuts its way some twelve or fifteen feet below. The air
was pure, the surroundings green, the prospect wide and lovely. Here was
a rare chance for picturesque gardening. Although the yard was without a
fence there had been some planting of flowers in it. Yet it could hardly
be called a garden. So destitute was it of any intelligent plan and so
uncared for that it seemed almost to have a conscious, awkward
self-contempt. In the flecked shade of a rude trellis of grapes that
sheltered a side door two children of the household fell to work with
great parade at a small machine, setting bristles into tooth-brushes for
a neighboring factory, but it was amusingly plain that their labor was
spasmodic and capricious.
The mother was away on a business errand. The father was present. He had
done his day's stint in the cutlery works very early, and with five
hours of sunlight yet before him had no use to make of them but to sit
on a bowlder on the crest of the pleasant hill and smoke and whittle.
Had he been mentally trained he might, without leaving that stone, have
turned those hours into real living, communing with nature and his own
mind; but he had, as half an eye could see, no developed powers of
observation, reflection or imagination, and probably, for sheer want of
practice, could not have fixed his attention on a worthy book through
five of its pages. The question that arose in the minds of his visitors
comes again here: what could have been so good to keep idleness from
breeding its swarm of evils in his brain and hands--and home--as for
somebody, something, somehow, to put it into his head--well--for
example--to make a garden? A garden, we will say, that should win a
prize, and--even though it failed to win--should render him and his
house and household more interesting to himself, his neighbors and his
town.
He and his house seemed to be keeping the Ten Commandments in a
slouching sort of way and we may even suppose they were out of
debt--money debt; yet already they were an unconscious menace to
society; their wage-earning powers had outgrown their wants. Outgrown
them not because the wages were too high but because their wants were
too low; were only wants of the body, wants of the barrenest unculture;
_the inelastic wants_.
That is "my own invention," that phrase! The bodily wants of a reptile
are elastic. If an alligator or a boa-constrictor catches a dog he can
swallow him whole and enjoy that one meal in unriotous bliss for weeks.
Thereafter if he must put up with no more than a minnow or a mouse he
can do that for weeks in unriotous patience. In a spring in one of our
Northampton gardens I saw a catfish swallow a frog so big that the hind
toes stuck out of the devourer's mouth for four days; but they went in
at last, and the fish, in his fishy fashion, from start to finish was
happy. He was never demoralized. It is not so with us. We cannot much
distend or contract our purely physical needs. Especially is any
oversupply of them mischievous. They have not the reptilian elasticity.
Day by day they must have just enough. But the civilized man has
spiritual wants and they are as elastic as air.
A home is a house well filled with these elastic wants. Home-culture is
getting such wants into households--not merely into single
individuals--that lack them. What makes a man rich? Is the term merely
comparative? Not merely. To be rich is to have, beyond the demands of
our bodily needs, abundant means to supply our spiritual wants. To
possess more material resources than we can or will use or bestow to the
spiritual advantage of ourselves and others is to be perilously rich,
whether we belong to a grinders' union in the cutlery works or to a
royal family. Why is it so often right that a rich college, for example,
should, in its money-chest, feel poor? Because it could so easily supply
more spiritual wants if it had more money.
Not low wages will ever make men harmless, nor high wages make them
happy, nor low nor high save them from a spirit of pauperism or of
malignant envy; but having wages bigger than their bodily wants, and
having spiritual wants numerous and elastic enough to use up the
surplus--spiritual wants, that know both how to suffer need and how to
abound, and to do either without backsliding toward savagery. Whoever
would help this state of things on, let him seek at the same time to
increase the home's wage-earning power and its spiritual powers to put
to fine use the wages earned: to augment the love of beauty in nature
and in art, the love of truth and knowledge, the love of achievement and
of service, the love of God and of human society, the ambition to put
more into the world than we get out of it. Wages will never be too
high, nor the hours of a day's work too many or too few, which follow
that "sliding scale." How much our garden contest may do of this sort
for that cottage on the hill we have yet to know; last year was its
first in the competition. But it has shown the ambition to enter the
lists, and a number that promised no more at the outset have since won
prizes. One such was so beautiful last year that strangers driving by
stopped and asked leave to dismount and enjoy a nearer view.
[Illustration: "Having wages bigger than their bodily wants, and having
spiritual wants numerous and elastic enough to use up the surplus."
The owner of this cottage, who stands on the lawn, spaded and graded it
and grassed it herself, and by shrubbery plantings about the house's
foundation and on the outer boundaries of the grass has so transformed
it since this picture was taken as to win one of the highest prizes
awarded among more than a thousand competitors.]
[Illustration: "One such competing garden was so beautiful last year
that strangers driving by stopped and asked leave to dismount and enjoy
a nearer view."
A capital prize-winner's back yard which was a sand bank when he entered
the competition. His front yard is still handsomer.]