At our Directors' Meetings, which are held frequently, we 
will welcome any suggestions from Members or Member Clubs. 
You should feel yourselves an integral part of the Garden Club 
OF America and a personal part of it too. We ask for suggestions 
and aspirations for our growing organization. 
Katherine C. Sloan. 
Garrison, N. Y. 
The Garden Club of America 
Why should any member send an article to the Bulletin 
about the Garden Club of America? At once, I admit 
that the idea seems a strange one, but because of an appearance 
of lassitude — or lack of interest on the part of some of the 
clubs, I believe the article is warranted. It has often seemed 
to me that the local clubs do not realize that they themselves 
with their individual members are the Garden Club of 
America. It is of them that the big organization is made, 
it has no other physical body and they are part and parcel of 
its purposes and activities. Definite and concrete interest in 
the home club exists everywhere ; but members do not 
appreciate that without the broad purposes of the National 
Organization, in which it is their great opportunity and proud 
privilege to play a part, their gardening interests would fall 
into purely local and small proportions. So, I feel sure that 
a few simple statements, carefully considered by the members 
of our various clubs, would go far toward changing any 
attitude of disinterested aloofness into one of proud co-operation. 
The first thing to be recognized in the Garden Club op 
America is its object as stated in its Constitution, which 
expresses Idealism and Altruism. The members of the Garden 
Club of America are banded together to hold fast to the ideals 
of the beautiful in the world of Nature, to help in the 
preservation to our own country of all that has been so lavishly 
given us of the wonders of creation, to protect the native plants 
and birds so thoughtlessly destroyed by man, and to assist in the 
beautifying of our civic centers, through the encouragement of 
wise and artistic planting. In the attainment of any of 
these objects, there cannot be anything of personal reward, 
and yet each and every object holds forth to its devotee the 
fullest realization of accomplishment. What in the physical 
world can more nearly approach idealism than the preservation 
of the beautiful. And what group of people can or should so 
heartily and generously throw themselves and their efforts into 
idealism as members of the Garden Club op America. To read 
the names of its Member Clubs is to read the names of the men 
