This
happy thought had a good effect, for, although in the first and second
years Father Gallon's people took prizes for gardens above the minimum
limit in size, while his own two prizes fell to contestants not in his
flock, yet only in the third year did it become to all of us quite as
plain as a pikestaff that fifty square yards are only the one-fiftieth
part of fifty yards square, and that whoever in Northampton had a
dooryard at all had fifty square yards. In 1903 more than two hundred
and fifty gardens were already in the contest but every one was large
enough to compete for the Carnegie prizes, and the kind bestower of the
extra ones (withdrawn as superfluous), unselfishly ignoring his own
large share of credit, wrote:
"Your gardens have altered the aspect of my parish."
Such praise is high wages. It is better than to have achieved the very
perfection of gardening about any one home. We are not trying to raise
the world's standard of the gardening art. Our work is for the home and
its indwellers; for the home and the town. Our ideal is a town of homes
all taking pleasant care of one another. We want to make all neighbors
and all homes esthetically interesting to one another, believing that
this will relate them humanely, morally and politically. We began with
those who pay no one to dig, plant or prune for them, but soon we went
further and ventured to open to gardens kept with hired service an
allied competition for a separate list of prizes.
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