This year we may confidently and unreservedly dedicate to beauty 
in our gardens. It is a long time since we have been able to give 
ourselves over to leisurely enjoyment of flowers and ornaments of 
green, but now that their day has come, I venture to think that 
enjoyment will be more careless and serene than in pre-war days. 
The discontent that caused resentment if flowers came wrong, or if 
weeds came at all, or if edges were crooked, or if visitors always came 
this week instead of last week or next, wiU be overborne by gratitude 
that we can have all the flowers we want and that, if we feel like it we 
can take time to pull up the weeds. We may not have gardeners to 
straighten the edges, but we hope for visitors, like ourselves grown less 
critical, and not in the least bothered as to what they might have 
seen last week or could see next but thrilled over what is there and 
spending all their extra moments telling you what they have blooming 
at home at that minute and in what perfection! 
How much time we have wasted in dissatisfied tours of our gardens, 
always hunting for imperfections and overlooking the very things we 
should be enjoying. I do not advocate smug contentment, but I do 
claim that each plant in its season deserves its due praise, that the 
whole is more important than the details that go to make it, that the 
too meticulous gardener may be just as tiresome as the too good 
housekeeper, and that if you will give a visitor one beautiful thing 
to look at and remember, that visitor will go away convinced that 
your garden is a dream of lovehness, whose charms she would re- 
produce in her own. 
We can have such fun this summer, if we wiU, just watching and 
working with the more frivolous growing things we have had tQ^ 
neglect so long. We can have even more fun if we can find others to 
watch with us. They will comfort us in our down-hearted moments 
when the color combination planned in the spring of 1914 comes out 
wrong, or when the Near-Eastern gardener's assistant spends $9.00 
worth of time chpping the wrong hedge. Unless we guilelessly pro- 
claim our misfortunes, they are very likely to admire our color scheme 
and commend the precision of the hedge-clipping. 
In other words, don't be too critical at home and don't expect 
others to be critical abroad. If your garden is pretty and sweet and 
gay, small blemishes should be attended to in business hours. (Do 
you keep business hours in your garden? You should.) And be sure 
that those who come to see are not there to hunt out the blemishes but 
to enjoy the prettiness and sweetness and gayety. Weeds will grow, 
high-priced labor is generally incompetent, rain beats down, drought 
dries up, and countless other calamities menace your plot of ground. 
But neighboring plots must face the same conditions, and only the 
