REGISTERED 
I N 
PATENT 
OFFICE 
Vol. XXV —No. 4 
April, 1914 
Putterin’ 
round the 
A WRITER in the Atlan¬ 
tic Monthly, two or 
three years ago, said that 
“the art of puttering con¬ 
sists of doing for yourself, 
s 1 o w 1 y and inefficiently, 
what you can pay someone 
else to do for you quickly 
and well.” The only fault 
in this definition is the spell¬ 
ing. A true putterer always 
drops his "g," and generally, 
too, he adds a “ ’round." 
You can no more putter suc¬ 
cessfully with a final “g" 
than with a high hat and pol¬ 
ished boots. Your speech, 
like your clothes, must be old 
and easy. Otherwise the 
definition cannot be im¬ 
proved, and it shows put¬ 
terin’ to be one of the most 
paradoxical of pleasures, the 
most soul warming of self- 
abasements. 
I will not enter into the 
vexed question whether put¬ 
terin' is not distinctly a mas¬ 
culine art, whether a woman 
will ever do anything herself, 
unless economy forces her 
to, which she can hire done 
better—some cynics would 
say, which she can hire done 
at all. It is not necessary to raise that question with relation to 
putterin' 'round the garden, because true garden putterin’ is not 
woman's work. It is too hard for her. She may plant bnlbs with 
a dibble, or set out seedlings, to be sure, but she can do that as 
well as any professional — till her back gives out. No, true garden 
putterin' consists of harder labor, and woman’s part in it must be 
advisory, at most. She can, perhaps, putter in place of the archi¬ 
tect, planning the pool or designing the trellis or plotting the new 
beds, but it is the man who must cement and saw and dig. 
I confess to being a confirmed putterer; nay, I boast of it. I 
have made myself, “slowly 
and inefficiently,” a brick 
sun-dial, a brick bird bath, 
two hundred feet of trellis, 
a rose arch, an ornamental 
trellis screen (at least, I 
think it ornamental), several 
hotbed frames and numerous 
flower beds, large and small. 
Presumably I could have 
employed the time in the 
practice of my vocation, and 
earned enough money to 
have had them made by pro¬ 
fessionals, twice over. But 
I'm glad I didn’t! I am 
prouder of that ornamental 
(honestly, it is!) trellis 
screen than of anything I 
ever wrote; and when, after 
days of back-breaking toil, I 
had excavated last spring a 
new perennial bed fifty feet 
long, in poor soil overrun 
with witch grass, had filled 
the bottom of my trench 
with manure carted in a 
wheelbarrow, had mixed my 
top soil with loam and fer¬ 
tilizer and put it once more 
in place, had sunk boards 
along the edges to keep the 
grass roots out, and built a 
trellis five feet high along 
the back, that fifty-foot strip of earth represented something far 
more precious to me than a potential flower border, which my 
gardener could have built in half the time at a nod from me. 
It represented, first of all, personal, stubborn toil, and nothing 
so humbles a man as the face-to-faoe realization of the physical 
effort involved in successful agriculture. In the second place, it 
represented the triumph of my hands and muscles over a new 
obstacle. Any fool with money can have things done for him, 
and I sometimes think any fool can have money. The gift of 
“making” it is the lowest of human attributes. But to do some- 
“To do something which isn’t in your line’ is to enlarge your power over your environ¬ 
ment — to flatter your ego’’ 
Garden 
(259) 
