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Editors' Note : Further constructive contributions to the vital question of keeping up the interests 

 in the Garden Clubs. The earlier articles in this series appeared in the June Garden Magazine 



III. IN THE DOLDRUMS BUT HEADING OUT 

 JULIAN HINCKLEY 



President of The Cedarhurst (N. Y.), Garden Club 



Collapse of All the Conventional Activities but Glimpses of an Expanding 

 Usefulness Appear in an Appreciation of the Peculiar Problems of the Locality 



1HEN I look back over the old programmes and an- 

 nouncements of our garden club, and especially the 

 little, inevitable "Constitution and By-laws" so neatly 

 printed and bound and tied with a ribbon, I con- 

 fess that I am smitten with sadness. Gone, all is gone of the 

 freshness, the dewy enthusiasm, the almost vital seriousness of 

 first organization. I can hardly believe that the Club met 

 regularly twice a month, much less that it was incumbent upon 

 every member to attend regularly, bringing fruits of her (or 

 his) own bodily toil together with remarks apropos. There were 

 a score of members, and their gardens were new, and they knew 

 nothing (apparently). Here before me is the list of lecture 

 meetings, two a month, with shows for almost everything. How 

 delightful it must have been! That first aspiration for enlight- 

 enment combined with those first fruits of one's own planting! 

 That mutual dependence and cooperation, that running in upon 

 one another for advice or to bring plants or to beg plants, or 

 merely to enthuse with a fellow enthusiast upon a morning too 

 fair to waste indoors crouched over a card table. 



1 wish I might begin as another has already done: "When we 



organized in the spring of last year " Unfortunately years 



have passed over our Club. The organization has grown, but 

 it has lost all its importance. Even new gardeners with new 

 gardens and new illusions cannot put back into the desiccated 

 husk the green freshness. There is less chance of these new 

 enthusiasts forming an intimate inner group than there would be 

 of their setting up a brand-new independent club, with the usual 

 first-year seriousness. 



Anent Meetings, Shows, and Lectures 



WE GAVE up meeting in the gardens once a fortnight, those 

 charming morning experience meetings — I know not 

 just why. That was before my time. Probably it rained every 

 second Thursday, and the few Thursdays that it did not rain 

 were not worth the exasperation of the other Thursdays when 

 it did. Or perhaps the mosquitoes controlled the meetings. 

 More likely still everyone had the same experiences, or could 

 make nothing of them, or simply the generous impulse to admire 

 somebody else's garden petered out. Possibly the gardens had 

 got too big, too much of a part of the other responsibilities of a 

 country place. The members stayed home from these jejune 

 meetings to give orders to head gardeners and assistant super- 

 intendents. 1 find that the big garden clubs like that in Lenox, 

 Mass., are semi-professional affairs, conducted for and by the 

 employed gardeners. Clubs like this run to shows where the 



professionals compete with collections of "six onions" or "five 

 orchids," and the ladies set tables for Barmecide banquets. 

 These shows have a certain obvious value in stimulating the 

 activities of one's employees. 



Our Club has for several years held a regular Tulip Show (early 

 May); Rose and Peony Show (June — sometimes held separately) 

 Fruit, Flower, and Vegetable Show (September — principal 

 flower being Dahlia) ; Chrysanthemum Show (not held since the 

 cold winter of ' 1 7—' 1 8) . Interest in these shows has steadily 

 declined. At first competition was so keen that rules upon 

 rules were required, and classes upon classes. There was a class 

 for (1) gardeners who employed a regular gardener, and (2) 

 gardeners who did their own work with the help of a useful 

 (useless) man. And there was a special class for novices. Rib- 

 bons were liberally bestowed for first, second, and honorable 

 mention in collections, single specimens, and I know not what 

 else. When I came to attend these shows everything was 

 bedizened with a badge of comparative merit. At our Tulip 

 Show this year one collection of Cottage Tulips was entitled to 

 all the ribbons, as there was no other competitor. 



Now as for lectures, I really haven't space to go into the reason 

 why we gave them up. Briefly, however, it amounted to the 

 fact that few of the lecturers were either interesting or informa- 

 tive. There was quite a well-known lecturer going about for 

 years among garden clubs who did not know — well, perhaps 

 that, too, is a long story. We got tired being told to dig our 

 rose beds three feet deep. I remember interrupting once to 

 inquire the cost per cubic yard of such a bed. Advice of this 

 kind is so stereotyped as to be not even detrimental. For- 

 tunately nobody pays any attention to it, or surely the race of 

 charlatan horticulturists would long since have been cut down 

 in the midst of their prevarication by an infuriated and dis- 

 illusioned multitude. As a matter of fact, few real experts (at 

 least those I have approached) care to lecture; they know too 

 well the fundamental ignorance of their audiences. " I spend 

 most of my lectures explaining why a Darwin is a Darwin," a 

 bulb grower told me, despairingly. 1 have repeatedly tried to 

 induce America's Miss Jekyll (not to embarrass the lady by men- 

 tioning her real name, familiar to readers of this magazine) to 

 address an informal gathering of our club; but she knows too 

 much! She knows the futility of garden club lectures, where 

 to be comprehensible she would have to restrict herself to poetic 

 allusion. My personal opinion is that almost any garden club 

 could profit by a series of lectures or readings, say a chapter each 

 meeting, from Clute's "Agronomy". And there is an article on 

 nomenclature in Bailey's " Standard Cyclopedia of Horticul- 



318 



