That is what we have made it in Northampton, Massachusetts, whose
curving streets and ancient elms you may have heard of as making it very
garden-like in its mere layout; many of whose windows, piazzas, and
hillside lawns look on across the beautiful Connecticut, winding broadly
among its farmed meadows and vanishing southward through the towering
gateway made for or by it millenniums ago between Mounts Tom and
Holyoke.
There Smith College is, as well as that "People's Institute"
aforementioned, and it is through that institute, one of whose several
branches of work is carried on wholly by Smith College students, that
we, the Northampton townspeople, established and maintain another
branch, our concerted gardening.
[Illustration: "You can make gardening a concerted public movement."
A gathering on My Own Acre in the interest of the Flower Garden
Competition.]
One evening in September a company of several hundred persons gathered
in the main hall of the institute's "Carnegie House" to witness and
receive the prize awards of their twelfth annual flower-garden
competition.
The place was filled. A strong majority of those present were men and
women who earn their daily bread with their hands. The whole population
of Northampton is but twenty thousand or so, and the entire number of
its voters hardly exceeds four thousand, yet there were one thousand and
thirteen gardens in the competition, the gardens of that many homes; and
although children had taken part in the care of many of them, and now
were present to see the prizes go to their winners, not one was
separately a child's garden.
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