The Boom in Organized Gardening b y Frances 



DUNCAN 



Community and Club Opportunity to Work Up a Really Practical Reaction From the Present Garden Boom 



ONE of the best things that Uncle Sam 

 has done for American agriculture, was 

 the war-created boom for organized 

 gardening. 

 Of course it happened to meet a national neces- 

 sity, but the boom is here. Never before has our 

 garden-work been so effectively and efficiently 

 organized as it was last summer. And having 

 found how well community effort worked, not 

 only yielding crops, but pleasure and profit and 

 health besides, no community will drop it. Or- 

 ganized gardening made it possible for any one to 

 go a-gardening; no matter how slight the experi- 

 ence, how slender the capital, how tiny the bit of 

 land, any one who last year wanted to have a gar- 

 den could have one. At whatever point he or she 

 needed help, it was pretty sure to be found and 

 competent, really helpful assistance too. 



Thrifty gardens in America have become a mat- 

 ter of civic and community pride. It is to be 

 hoped that the garden pageants and processions 

 which last year were such an interesting part of 

 the garden work will be repeated and become a 

 regular and essential part of the year's events. 

 We have in America altogether too few occasions 

 when the whole community comes together for 

 a merrymakirig. Everyone knows what pleasure, 

 in any town or city that has had the wit to inau- 

 gurate the custom, has been given by the com- 

 munity Christmas tree and the revival of open 

 air carol singing on Christmas Eve. With this, 

 a yearly garden pageant easily could take rank 

 and become the spring event as the other is the 

 winter one. It would be a delightful inaugural 

 for the year's garden work and the whole com- 

 munity would begin their gardens with more than 

 the usual zest and enthusiasm — and get together 

 on it. 



The pageants could be as elaborate or as simple 

 as the townsfolk wished. One after the fashion 

 of the very successful one in Atlanta could be ar- 

 ranged by the smallest community or group and 

 at trifling expense. That consisted in a citizens' 

 parade, including everyone from school children 

 to the Mayor and all armed with some sort of 

 garden-implements — hoe or rake or watering-pot 

 swung aloft — figuratively, it was a marching 

 around the Jericho of the vacant-lot spaces that 

 were to be conquered and made fertile and pro- 

 ductive. 



TV/TORE ambitious communities will have more 

 ■*-'-■• elaborate pageants, floats planned and ar- 

 ranged by local florists or seedsmen or by garden 

 clubs, but the Atlanta feature of a plowing con- 

 test between the Mayor and the Governor with 

 which that pageant ended would be a highly in- 

 teresting event for any community to duplicate 

 between important officials. 



The war-garden committees of last year will 



this year, where the personnel was successful, be- 

 come permanent committees. It is well to note 

 that where the gardening was most efficient, there 

 was back of it a well balanced, thoroughly repre- 

 sentative committee, such as that in Chicago 

 where park commissioners, truck gardeners, com- 

 mercial florists, business men, were on the com- 

 mittee as well as the usual quota of club-women, 

 of the philanthropically inclined, and of the social- 

 welfare people. The presence on such a com- 

 mittee of practical and experienced gardeners 

 must have been invaluable. 



In the office of the Chicago garden-committee 

 hung a map of the city, districted carefully, com- 

 munity centres marked where lectures might be 

 held, and each district was in charge of someone 

 who knew about gardening — it might be any one 

 of the existing garden-clubs or garden-organiza- 

 tions — but some one of them was responsible fop 

 seeing to it that the folk in that area had a chance 

 to make gardens if they wished, and encourage- 

 ment and "first aid" in the endeavor. Volunteer 

 lay-supervisors were found for the children's gar- 

 dens, men and women whose qualification was 

 that they had fairly successful gardens of their 

 own, and would agree to have a look, so many 

 times a week at so many little gardens. 



Many a community besides Chicago, broke 

 through the idiotic iron rule which obtained in 

 Philadelphia — and may hold elsewhere for aught 

 I know — that only a teacher, a regular normal 

 graduate, may lawfully teach gardening to chil- 

 dren in school gardens. The normal graduate 

 may know mighty little about gardening, those 

 who adjudge her qualifications may know less — 

 that matters not to the Board of Education. She 

 is a teacher, therefore can teach, whether or not 

 she and the subject be acquainted ! Such brainless 

 ruling, and the deadly uniformity practised and 

 enforced in many garden enterprises on the luck- 

 less little folk, have sat like a dead weight on our 

 school gardening effectively keeping it from doing 

 anything worth while. Little strings of red tape 

 have tied it up as effectively as was Gulliver in 

 Lilliput. 



In many communities and cities Uncle Sam's 

 war gardening has broken up this and let the little 

 gardeners come into direct touch with folk of their 

 own town or community who have gardens and 

 understand them and love them — which has 

 proved for the small gardeners and their gardens 

 a wonderfully vitalizing influence. Let us hope, 

 for the good of American school gardening that 

 the scholastic iron clamp stays broken. 



Community use for the park greenhouses is an 

 accident of the war gardening that has come to 

 stay. We may have fewer bedding out plants 

 in the parks next summer, possibly plant more 

 hardy things and hardy garden flowers than 

 Coleus and the like, of which manv of us have be- 



come thoroughly tired. There is so little inven- 

 tion required in the same old order of setting out 

 the square or circular beds — Cannas in the middle, 

 Coleus or Ageratum at the edge — that to have our 

 park gardeners go in for a really lovely blending 

 of color in permanently planted borders would 

 be a blessed relief, and some slight diversion of 

 the original use of the park greenhouses to a wider 

 community usefulness might not only bless com- 

 munity gardeners but bless the parks as well. 



170R really effective organized gardening, 

 ■*■ linking up the local enterprise with the state 

 agricultural work is most valuable. Whoever is 

 in charge of organizing a garden work in his com- 

 munity and feels a bit unequal to the task — or 

 even if he or she feels perfectly and supremely com- 

 petent, will find it worth while to write to O. H. 

 Benson of the U. S. Department of Agriculture, 

 and if he or she feels a bit unequal to the task, 

 there is for him very direct and extremely useful 

 information and excellent ideas of "just how" to 

 do it; or even if he or she feels perfectly and sup- 

 remely competent, there will be hints and sugges- 

 tions of very real value. 



One of the most important problems in success- 

 ful community gardening is that of marketing. 

 Many a truck gardener and farmer who last year, 

 at Uncle Sam's behest went energetically and ex- 

 tensively into planting extra acreage only to find 

 a loss for himself because of lack of marketing 

 facilities or of labor to harvest his crops will this 

 year plan for his marketing earlier. One of the 

 most helpful suggestions along this line comes 

 from Mr. Rhett of Charleston, South Carolina, 

 in which city the business men, finding that the 

 farmers were peculiarly weak in the matter of 

 managing their marketing to advantage — for 

 after all it is a different trade from growing — met 

 with them and cooperated, greatly to the advant- 

 age of all concerned. To a great extent, market- 

 ing problems are local and if growers and busi- 

 ness men get together on them some solution 

 should be possible and fairly easy. At all events 

 it worked in Charleston. 



/"\NE of the happiest results of the perfected gar- 

 ^"'den organization has been the development 

 of something like a real community spirit — and 

 that?, one hopes, has come to stay. Townsfolk will 

 become acquainted with one another's gardening 

 achievement; they will become acquainted with 

 young gardeners of promise. The Women's Na- 

 tional Farm and Garden Association in many 

 a state is offering scholarships for expenses at 

 Agricultural Colleges, so that girls seriously in- 

 terested in agriculture as a profession may take 

 up the study whether or not they have sufficient 

 means of their own at their disposal. 



Where only the bare earth was before, this garden of annuals and lawn was the result of five 

 months' work. (Londsdale. R. I.) 



The new type of school garden with permanent plantings of trees and shrubs in real garden-like 

 style is found at Providence, R. I. 



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