At its Fifth Annual Meeting, the Garden Club finds itself with 
important work to do. We hope and expect to meet the emergency. 
Our four years of affiliation have been fruitful years. Without this 
relationship we might have gardened wisely and well, but with a less 
keen sense of responsibility, a less ardent desire to do ourselves credit. 
Certainly we should have learned less and been less fitted for the work 
to come. For if the Garden Club has done nothing else, it has fos- 
tered and enormously increased the great wave of garden-interest that 
has swept America during the past few years. We of the Garden 
Club who have talked gardens and thought gardens and worked in 
gardens have helped to fit the American people to meet the agricul- 
tural and horticultural problems which now confront them. Our 
enthusiasm was given to the less practical issues, but we have learned 
and taught the art of gardening and the war finds us with tilled fields 
and ready minds. Fewer flowers may grow in those fields and our 
minds be crowded with less beautiful things, but the belief that we 
have helped to arouse America horticulturally and agriculturally is 
one that we may cherish truthfully and proudly. 
Fifth Annual Meeting of 
The Garden Club of America 
Held at the Cosmopolitan Club, New York 
Wednesday, June 13, 1917 
The President, Mrs. J. Willis Martin of Philadelphia, called the 
meeting to order at 10:30 and opened the meeting with the reading of 
an ode by William Cullen Bryant: 
Ode for an Agricultural Celebration 
The proud throne shall crumble, 
The diadem shall wane, 
The tribes of earth shall humble 
The pride of those who reign; 
And War shall lay his pomp away; — 
The fame that heroes cherish, 
The glory earned in deadly fray 
Shall fade, decay and perish. 
Honor waits, o'er all the earth, 
Through endless generations, 
The art that calls her harvest forth, 
And feeds tti expectant nations. 
