By a rule of the contest, each garden had
been required to comprise the entire home lot, with the dwelling for its
dominating feature and the family its spiritual unit.
The ceremony of award began with the lowest cash prize and moved
steadily up to the second and first, these two being accompanied by
brilliantly illuminated diplomas, and as each award was bestowed, the
whole gathering of winners and non-winners--for no one could be called a
loser--sounded their congratulations by a hearty clapping of hands. They
had made the matter a public, concerted movement, and were interested in
its results and rewards as spiritual proprietors in a common possession
much wider than mere personal ownership under the law.
This wider sentiment of community, so valuable to the whole public
interest, was further promoted by the combining of nearly two hundred of
these same gardens in "neighborhood garden clubs" of seven or more
gardens each, every garden in each club directly adjoining another, and
the clubs competing for prizes of so much a garden to the best and
second-best clubs.
Yet none the less for all this, but much more, a great majority of the
multitude of home gardeners represented by this gathering were enjoying
also--each home pair through their own home garden--the pleasures of
personal ownership and achievement.
Many of the prize-winners were young, but many were gray, and some were
even aged, yet all alike would have testified that even for age, and so
all the more for youth, artistic flower-gardening is as self-rewarding a
form of unselfish work and as promptly rewarding a mode of waiting on
the future as can easily be found; that there is no more beautifully
rewarding way by which youth may
"Learn to labor and to wait.
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