anding 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