i6 
PARK AND CEMETERY. 
IMPROVEMENT ASSOCIATIONS. 
Conductd by 
Frances Copley Seavey. 
Leave the World a pleasanter place than you found it. 
WORK FOR women’s CLUBS. 
“There are not only art galleries to establish, 
but parks and squares to decorate — western life its 
self to be made beautiful! Surely there is enough 
for the clubs to do.’’ 
The note struck in this sentence apropos of work 
undertaken by womens clubs by LoradoTaft, sculp- 
tor, lecturer and art critic, is so opportune and so 
suggestive that it should be prolonged and em- 
phasized. 
No one is likely to take issue with the assertion 
that it is eminently woman’s place to make home, 
home-like, and surely by right of precedent and 
unwritten law, it is her right and pleasure to beautify 
the world. 
No home can be home-like without decorative 
planting and there is no better, or more necessary 
way to beautify the world than by the exterior dec- 
oration of homes individually and collectively. 
By their horticultural deeds shall ye know them, 
is to a large extent true, for while only a few see the 
interior of homes, the exterior is seen by all. Yet, 
too often, nothing but horticultural misdeeds are 
visible. 
Neither women as individuals nor women 
strengthened by club organization may hope to find 
a better, more useful or more satisfactory field of 
labor than that which lies waiting on every hand in 
every community Work that is not only suffering 
to be done, but the public is suffering because it is 
not done. 
The study of art and of artists is good, but the 
work of preserving the love of the beautiful inherent 
in our species, is better. This love of beauty is 
latent in the childhood all about us, but is actually 
starving from lack of food. Shakespeare says “the 
eye must be fed.” Think of the nature of the sus- 
tenance supplied in most communities! 
Simple natural beauty — grass, trees, flowers — 
is the birthright of every child, but our artificial 
manner of living has obliterated it for thousands 
and so the simple, legitimate pleasures of childhood 
and of youth are denied to the direct damage of 
manners and morals. To remedy such a state of 
affairs should be a duty and a pleasure to those who 
are earnestly looking about for opportunities to 
better the world. To leave the world a pleasanter 
place than one found it is as honorable — if, indeed. 
it is not synonymous with leaving it better than one 
found it. 
Both children and adults who live among attrac- 
tive surroundings are in some degree prepared to 
appreciate and profit by the study of art and of 
literature. They cannot know how pictures of 
landscapes should look until they have become 
accustomed to such scenes as they represent. 
It is quite possible to make every dooryard a 
picture that an artist would be willing to use as the 
subject of a painting. Not only is this strictly 
true, but hundreds and thousands of people who 
would delight in such growing pictures cannot — cr 
at least, will not, learn to appreciate the picture 
of the picture. 
A whole community will derive benefit from 
one barren door yard that is redeemed by good 
planting, will enjoy the shade and refreshment of 
one row of street trees. 
What would result if an entire community, 
neglected before, should be so transformed? Would 
not the children rejoice and the old people and the 
invalids be glad? If so, then what about the busy 
house mothers who rarely have time or opportunity 
for a pleasure trip, a day on the river or at the lake 
shore, or any break in the dreary monotony of ex- 
istence. They may not go to the mountain, but a 
charming fragment of the mountain, or the plain, 
or the lake shore, or the woodland or any bit one 
elects as suitable, may be carried to them, and they 
may have it not for a day only but for the entire 
season. 
If a bit of landscape is not possible (but it 
usually is) there can at least be a garden, and an 
attractive one, to replace the ash-heaps, tin cans or 
sun baked inclosure. There is not a piece of ground 
that cannot be made to grow something that 
will make the place look better than it looked 
before 
If one half of the earnest endeavor put forth by 
womens clubs in this country last year should be 
intelligently expended this year on replacing the 
present lack of planting, or the present hit-or-miss 
style of planting of home grounds; on regenerating 
the present scorched, dusty wildernesses known by 
courtesy, as schoolhouse grounds; on relieving the 
ordinary cheerless and barren church yards; on 
making little parks out of neglected, unused ground 
or on railway station grounds; on planting well 
chosen trees in the right places and shrubbery and 
vines where they will do the most good and on hosts 
of other good — really good — work along these lines, 
the face of the country would be visibly altered for 
the better. 
The study of the best in painting or in sculpture 
when one’s own door yard is a wilderness of every- 
