and inducing seedsmen and growers to adopt a common standard color 
chart for the description of flowers. Both the central body generally 
and its constituents, each in its respective locality, ought to be able in 
time to exercise influence upon official taste as expressed in parks and 
public grounds, and to induce intelligent horticultural experimentation 
by park administrations and in schools and colleges. 
The Garden Club of America, it seems to me, should leave the 
policy and control of member clubs to the member clubs themselves. It 
will thus avoid the tendency unduly to standardize or conventionalize. 
By permitting and encouraging each member club to work out its own 
salvation it will encourage individual initiation and resourcefulness, and 
develop a stimulating variety of personality. Yet the central organiza- 
tion can exercise a valuable influence upon all its constituent clubs by 
maintaining a high standard of character and efficiency for itself, and in 
all the work which it undertakes. 
For one thing, I feel that the Garden Club of America should 
establish and insist upon a high standard of club membership. By so 
doing a check undoubtedly would be put upon local clubs as to their 
own standards of membership, which are likely to be relaxed under 
various local or personal influences. 
After our delegates returned from the last Annual Meeting our 
Executive Committee has been much more careful and discriminating in 
passing upon candidates for membership. We feel more responsible 
for the maintenance of a standard and for making our club effective 
and interesting than we did before the formation of a national organiza- 
tion. The Garden Club of America can unquestionably render service 
to American gardening not only by accumulating and making accessible 
valuable information, but by stimulating interest and enterprise and in- 
spiring individuals and organizations. 
B XPGlarninG 
Lenox, Mass., June 6, 1914. 
Please sound a loud warning to garden owners far and wide. The 
tent ivorms are devouring us and moving south and west! Every year 
we have a few, but this summer they are in hordes, and the roadside 
trees and shrubs are defoliated and loaded with the disgusting hairy 
caterpillars and their ugly nests. 
Some wise villages have escaped because they took the precaution, 
last autumn, to offer prizes to local schools for the greatest number of 
egg clusters brought in during the winter and spring. We will use this 
plan in future. 
Thomas Shields Clarke, 
President Lenox Garden Club. 
