"Mow your lawn as often as the mower will cut the grass, but also keep it thoroughly weeded. As a rule, in laying out your plantings avoid straight lines and hard angles; the double curve, or wave line, is the line of grace. Plant all the flowers you wish, few or many, but set shrubs at their back to give stronger and more lasting effects when the flowers are out of season as well as while they are in bloom.
"Try to plant so as to make your whole place one single picture of a home, with the house the chief element and the boundary-lines of the lot the frame. Plant on all your lot's boundaries, plant out the foundation-lines of all its buildings; but between these plantings keep the space grassed only, and open. In these house and boundary borders let your chief plantings be shrubs, and so have a nine months' instead of a three months' garden."
The secretary's tour completed and his score of all the gardens tabulated, a list is drawn from it of the one hundred and fifty best gardens, and a second circuit of counsel and inspection, limited to this greatly reduced number, is made by the president of the institute, who marks them again on the same four points of merit.
These two markings, averaged, determine the standing of all prize-winning gardens except the leading four. Then the president calls in one professional and one amateur expert, visits with them as many of the most promising contestants as can be seen in an afternoon's drive, and with them decides the award of the four highest prizes.
"Plant on all your lot's boundaries, plant out the foundation-lines of all its buildings."
A secluded back corner of a prize-winner's garden which shows how slight a planting may redeem the homeliness of an old fence.
"Not chiefly to reward the highest art in gardening, but to procure its widest and most general dissemination."
A cheap apartment row whose landlord had its planting done by the People's Institute.
That is all. When we have given two or three lesser items our story is told—for what it is worth. It is well to say we began small; in our first season, fifteen years ago, our whole roll of competitors numbered but sixty. It is the visiting that makes the difference; last season these visits, volunteer and official, were more than thirty-one hundred.