share. Before Garden Clubs were invented, we looked in vain for 
sympathetic souls (or fellow-cranks). But in association we have 
found them, not many but a few, and Garden should mean more 
to us, not less, while Club should mean a fellowship of amateurs, 
gardeners for love, who through the Bulletin emerge from solitude 
and become articulate. 
Some Aims in Gardening 
By Gertrude Jekyll 
The acceptance of the pleasant task of writing some articles on 
horticultural subjects for my fellow garden lovers across the wide 
Atlantic sets me thinking about a few of the main things I have learnt 
during a lifetime of devotion to the beauty of plants and to the efifort 
towards finding ways of employing them worthily. 
Gardening is unlike any other form of decorative art in that its 
material is always growing and changing, and it is in watching these 
developments, and ministering to general wants and individual de- 
mands, that good culture consists. There must needs be some first 
intention or plan, if the garden is to be other than quite commonplace, 
but whatever this may be, the good gardener must be ever on the 
watch and ready to do any service that may be required. It is just 
this conviction of the need of constant watchfulness, the feeling that 
the flowers are dependent for their happiness and well being on our 
ceaseless care, that makes gardening so humanly interesting — the 
consciousness that, under the greater controlling Power, we are al- 
lowed to create and maintain all that beautiful life that seems so will- 
ingly and gladly to reward the application of knowledge slowly and 
laboriously gained. 
However small and humble, a garden may be a work of fine art, 
and it is perhaps the little gardens that give their owners the great- 
est happiness. For here nothing comes between the man or woman 
and the growing things, and here that quality of restraint, which in 
all pleasure grounds must prevail if anything good is to be achieved, 
becomes a necessity. As in all good art the aim must be founded first 
on common sense and fitness, and then built up with a humble and 
adoring worship of beauty. With the gradual knowledge gained by 
experience the ways and wants and best uses of the various plants will 
be recognized, until the time comes when the wisdom acquired can be 
employed with some degree of confidence. 
One safe rule is not to attempt too much at a time. Where a beau- 
tiful plant or shrub can be almost isolated it is all the better enjoyed. 
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