Our Progressive Features for 1916 
We love to surprise the public every little while with some original thought 
or radical departure from the narrow path of the past and for this reason we 
are delighted to have so much to tell you at this time. 
Just think of it—we have the courage and the nerve to do what everyone 
in our line of business considers the impossible, and would shudder at the 
thought of doing—namely, to guarantee our seeds, bulbs and plants. We 
want you to read carefully every word in our guarantee, and we want you to 
realize that for the last 200 years in America, as long as seeds were ever offered, 
you have never been able to purchase them with a guarantee. 
Why can we afford to do this — and not our competitors? Because we tell 
the truth about our seeds and we have such confidence in them that we can 
afford to take this momentous step. 
We appreciate the intelligence and the reasoning power of our patrons to 
interpret our guarantee with a sense of justice and reasonableness, and we 
know they will applaud us for it. 
This act of ours alone must stand out forever as the most progressive step 
ever undertaken in the seed world. 
In the way of service we are pleased to announce the acceptance of a 
suggestion made by one of our patrons, namely: We shall present our cus¬ 
tomers in the future with a wooden label for every variety of seed furnished, 
and thus eliminate the old-fashioned method of using the seedbag as a marker, 
which, as a rule, is destroyed with the first rain. 
Our original color descriptions, as per Dr. Ridgway’s Color Chart, have 
been much supplemented to make the book almost complete with them. 
We have again added to our list of annuals many beautiful varieties, 
which are known but little in America, and we wish to announce that every 
year we shall experiment with 100 additional varieties of forgotten annuals 
for adding them, if worthy, to our list, and these may be seen growing during 
the summer at our gardens at Flushing. 
We are reviving this year the old-fashioned roses of “ Grandmother’s 
Garden,” and we know that the public will approve of it by ordering gener¬ 
ously from this list. Have you ever enjoyed the true sentiment that our 
garden flowers teach us? How much more we cherish them if they are old 
friends that make us a return visit. 
We have revised our story of “Troubles in the Garden,” added them to the 
book, and disclose this year for the first time several remedies for troubles 
which formerly were not obtainable. 
