Editor’s Note: The garden club is a great factor in neighborhood bet¬ 
terment. Here is a true story of the work of a certain such club and its 
accomplishments taken from the diary of one of its members. What this 
club actually did should be a stimulus to all who love gardens and a guide to 
the zvays and means of improving our towns and villages. These chapters 
began in the February issue, when the organization of the Club was dis¬ 
cussed. Each installment shows how the program of activities was followed 
out. 
W ELL, my fritillarias were lovely! And they won me a 
prize, which I received at the meeting yesterday — and 
which I am very proud of and pleased with, it is a flat gathering 
basket; and when June brings the roses I expect to use it a great 
deal, for I have a lot of new rose plants — hybrid teas, too, even- 
one !—and shall have a world of flowers unless all calculations 
fail. These I ordered and received early — and got at a bargain 
as a consequence, gaining a full dozen plants on four dozen, half 
of which Polly Addicks took ; so we each have thirty new ones. 
We are both going to plant them the first pleasant day this 
week—and take such care of them as never was, of course—and 
raise some prize winners! Oh, wonderful spur to laggard effort is 
this judicious competition business! I am reading all the rose 
literature that I can lay hands on; and I do not feel now that 
either heat or insects troubling the plants or me can daunt m\ 
soaring ambitions when these arrive — the insects and heat I 
mean, of course. But experience warns me right here that I must 
be doubly on my guard when 1 have this exalted feeling. 
My iris look very promising for show flowers by the twenty- 
eighth. but of peonies I shall have almost none, for the blight 
made havoc with these last summer. I am as well off as most of 
the others in the club, however, for the plants all about here have 
been fairly mowed down by the ‘‘grim reaper. Indeed, it is 
high time that we as a club took some organized action to over¬ 
come this, I think ; and we did talk of it to-day a little bit, although 
we were short because it was a Salton-Appleby afternoon, and 
sbe had an artist out from town who came to tell us all about 
“Color in the Garden” ; and he was growing restless at not being 
noticed, and she was growing restless to call attention to him. 
So a little thing like community effort to overcome a scourge had 
to go by the board, of course. Really, some things are trying- 
more so than others! 
Mrs. Addicks made a note of it, however, and told us on the way 
home that she would look the subject up herself a little, and see 
what was the best way of getting at it — what had been done, and 
so on ; and she thought we might have some special lecturer about 
it from the State Experiment Station, perhaps before the sum¬ 
mer is over. It is a thing I have always been very keen about 
since the summer we had cousin Persis’ place and worked so hard 
to save the elms from that terrible leaf beetle, while no one else in 
the town did a thing — making all our efforts vain, or almost so, as 
a consequence. And, surely it is a matter for a garden club to 
take up, if anyone ever is going to take it up — but there’s the 
artist person waiting, so I cannot go into it now ! 
He was really not a bad sort of person, and not as artistic look¬ 
ing as one would have expected to find at the Salton-Appleby’s; 
and be had some really charming ideas and a funny way of put¬ 
ting things, and quaint twists to him generally that were amusing 
and refreshing. So it was not such a bad afternoon, all things 
considered. Indeed, he had us in convulsions at one time, with 
his word picture of a futurist's garden, drawn in the most serious 
manner—which Polly Addicks declares was to try us out. She 
thinks he actually intended carrying it through as a bona fide 
proposition if someone had not begun to titter — and then someone 
else, and so on. And, to be sure, there is no telling! 
He ran to unusual combinations — that is, they were unusual a 
few years ago—his favorite color scheme being purples and reds, 
apparently. These are, of course, wonderful together, in the 
right place — and the right shades; but I must say 1 cannot stand 
all such combinings that I have met with. And, of course he did 
not know what plants were any given shade — their names I 
mean — being a painter artist, instead of a gardener artist, so be 
could not actually name the things to use for any given combina¬ 
tion ; but Miss Lucy made up a list of a flower that would repre¬ 
sent each color as he showed it on his color chart, as well as she 
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