March 1932

ALONG THE GARDEN PATH

WE HAVE leisurely crossed the bridge called Winter and are now standing on the end which faces Early Spring, but the path is so muddy that we wonder whether we should dare step into the springtime or whether we should wait.

The Diary of a Plain Dirt Gardener

MARCH 1. Yesterday was like summer; today was March-- chilly, windy, and almost freezing. I fired the furnace and both fireplaces all day, and still we shivered.

Just an Ordinary Home Grounds

THE landscape plan on this page has been designed for the average home grounds. No stock plan ever exactly fits any particular problem of landscaping, but it serves to illustrate the principles of good design.

The Trees and Shrubs

PLANTING is the last step in the improvement of the home grounds-- the final embellishment. Ideally, building the walks, pool, and rock garden and the grading should be finished before planting is started.

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The Perennials, Annuals, and the Rockery

A GARDEN on a 50-foot lot is at once a blessing and a challenge. It's not too big for personal tending. But, like a tabloid, it has room for only the best and the important.

Story-telling Music

SINCE the beginning of the world story-telling has been one of the happiest ways in which people have entertained each other. Even today, as in earlier days, in such parts of the world as Arabia, Persia, and other Oriental lands the professional storyteller is a very important and honored person, always welcome.

How We Won the National Yard and Garden Contest

FOUR years ago we built our home among the beautiful orange groves of southern California. On the north it faces the foothills of the rugged peaks of the Sierras, with their colorful lights and shadows. Part of the year these mountains are covered with snow, which, aside from its beauty, assures us of an adequate water supply.

How to Conduct a Family Quarrel

JIM and Ethel have been married several years now and are still very much in love with each other; but each finds the other trying in a large variety of ways.

Now You Can Know the Cost to Build That Home!

"WHAT will that home cost us, built in our own city?" is a perplexing question-- one that has never been satisfactorily answered.

Here's What You Can Do With an Old-fashioned Porch

IN THOSE days when the home was an American house and nothing else, the porch was probably the most typical element of it. Certainly it was the most prominent characteristic and often appeared to be the largest part of the home. With its size and usual embellishments of scrollwork and turnings, moldings and applied decoration, one seldom failed to see it nor to know at once what it was.

The Right Start Is SO Important

HOW pleasant it would be, a friend of mine occasionally remarks, if we could begin life as old people instead of as babies and grow younger all the time. Coming into the world with wisdom and experience, we would attain more and more strength and vigor; our decline would be into happy, rosy childhood, then into the state of infants, tenderly loved and cared for. An intriguing thought, certainly. It reminds me of motion pictures that are run backward, in which we first see the dive completed, and then behold the swimmer spring up from the water in a mighty, miraculous bound and alight on the diving board, or in which the dynamited hillside collects its scattered atoms and is seen whole once more.

How to Grow Delphiniums Successfully

DELPHINIUM seeds will germinate beautifully regardless of their origin, ancestors, or soil conditions. Much nonsense has been written about Delphiniums, and because the printed word assumes a sacred halo for us we readily believe it. Let someone say that old plaster is the key to success with Delphiniums and plaster becomes drug on the market.

A Little Home to Love and Keep

ROMANCE and charm are elusive and hard to catch, and, strange to say, simplicity, which does most toward incorporating these elements in a home, is shunned as a small boy shuns a bath. The fact that a home is small does not keep it from being beautiful; on the contrary, it is more likely to be attractive because it is quaint.

The Cost to Build This Home

A TWO-CENT stamp, for postage and handling, will bring you a complete list of materials required to build this home, with the exact quantities of each item. This list, carefully prepared by experts, is a part of Better Homes and Gardens' BILDCOST HOME PLAN, announced in the January issue and again explained on page 21 of this issue.

The Up-to-Date Nursery

OF ALL the rooms in the home, the one used as a nursery provides the most fascinating furnishing problem. In this room, where absolute care and thought of its young occupant is uppermost, today's efficiency can well be combined with attractiveness.

What My Brief Experience With Roses Has Taught Me

WHEN I stop to think about it my experience in rose culture reads almost like a patent-medicine advertisement. Three years ago I did not know one rose from another and did not care to know. Whenever my wife suggested hoeing the rose garden I immediately had acute pains in the neck and disappeared for the rest of the day.

Over the Hills and Far Away

THE demure little recluse and genius, Emily Dickinson wrote from her quiet garden in Amherst, There is no frigate like a book To take us lands away, and how right she is I have been proving to myself this last month as I've been climbing aboard many a book-frigate and sailing the seven seas.

I Plan Meals on Fridays and Tuesdays

HALFWAY between the method of planning meals for a week in advance and the practice of not planning meals at all, is twice-a-week menu-making, a procedure which works like magic in my home. And inasmuch as my home is very much like your home and my problems are the problems of every homemaker, I would like to tell you just why every Friday and Tuesday finds me scanning the contents of the refrigerator and trying to think of some bright ideas.

Making the Kitchen Livable

Round Out Your Furnishings

UNPAINTED furniture may, be successfully used to supplement other pieces or to furnish a room thruout. The former use is more practicable for a living-room, where a piece may be a particularly decorative addition in providing a color note in an otherwise somber setting.

Conquering a Stubborn Soil

A GOOD soil is a lucky possession. Few of us have the fertile, native soil for our gardens because where homes are built grading must be done and the good soil becomes lost in the shuffle.

Our Junior Photographers

HURRAH for the prizewinners of our Junior Garden Club photograph contest! What fun you thousands of Junior Gardeners have had learning to be ever on the lookout for beautiful things and interesting events in the world of flowers, gardens, and Nature and to record them with your cameras.

The High Points of Lawn-making

LET'S look into the prevalent beliefs about lawns. Take, for example, the notion that all we need to do is to scratch the surface of the soil about our home, sow some grass seed, and sit back blissfully expecting a perfect lawn to appear as if by magic.

How School Clubs Function

DO YOU recall the oldtime literary society that existed in the public schools twenty-five years ago?

WHEN A WOMAN SHOPS

TENDENCIES in furniture, draperies, and floor coverings for the home this spring will lean toward the eighteenth- century period.

Screech Owls Don't Screech

WITH wrenhouses, martinhouse, bluebird house, trees, thickets, and other places of bird habitations close to our breakfast-nook window, it had often been our pleasure to watch the bathing, feeding, wooing, and the raising of broods of young while we sat of mornings over our breakfast, enjoying immensely, meanwhile, the antics of our bird friends.

Now the Way I Do

A Tree-planting Contest for Children

Have You An Eye for Color?

FAVORITE ROSES

The Children's Pleasure Chest

ALMOST like a fairy story, luck came to Poky, the little snail who was a natural acrobat.

WE RECOMMEND

Make Your Rug This Way

ACROSS THE EDITOR'S DESK

THAT wise and whimsical writer on family relationships, Wainwright Evans, tells this month, on page 20, how to conduct a family quarrel. But this is only his quaint way of putting it, for of course the whole purpose of his article is to show how family quarrels can be avoided.