May 1933

Across the Editor's Desk

BILLY, our terrier, was lost! If you haven't had a dog lost, you can't imagine the consternation. An advertisement was inserted in the local newspaper, and then we began to get new slants on human nature.

It's News to Me!

It's fun to be friends with Alfred Hottes when he's moving his fish to the garden pool. By the way, his is the neatest, sweetest little small-lot garden with a pool that ever was. (Yours is? May be, Nick and I haven't seen yours.)

Sing a Sone of Sedums

THERE is a Sedum for every purpose. And Sedums are a gardener's delight. A good collection of the hardy stonecrops, Sedums, can furnish the answer to almost every demand for a low plant of good foliage-- for rock gardens, edgings, ground covers, chinks in terrace pavement, dish gardens, and trailing covers for sleeping small bulbs.

Simple Food With Variations

AMONG the favorite piano pieces of a former generation were old memories such as "Home Sweet Home" and "Long, Long Ago," elaborated with trills and runs called variations. Much of our cooking is like that old music. We add variations of one kind or another to our basic recipes until we have an almost endless number of interesting dishes.

Gardening in the Rain

A. SWEET-FACED Polish woman who keeps a small grocery store near where I live spoke to me recently about her girlhood on a farm in Russian Poland. She especially remembered, she said, the joy of working in the soil on rainy days. You came in afterward feeling so good and so hungry that it was nicer than the days on which the sun shone.

First-Prize Winner in Our "Before and After" Home-Furnishings Contest

HERE is the room which won first prize in our "Before and After" Home-Furnishings Contest which was opened to Better Homes and Gardens families last October and concluded in December. A first prize of $100 was given for the best instance of an improved room as shown by photographs taken before and after the changes.

A PREVIEW of Your 12-to 18-Year-Old

OF ALL the types of problems that come to my desk in letters from readers, there is one that always makes me smile, not unkindly, but with much the smile of a doctor who tells the young matron that the only thing ailing her is that she is going to be a mother.

Have You Entered the $3,000 Better Homes Contest?

NOW, more than ever, yon will want to enter your home in the $3,000 National Better Homes Contest. For not only do you have a chance to win one of the 116 cash prizes offered by Better Homes and Gardens for the best examples of home improvement made this year, but you may also win a prize in a similar Better Homes Contest sponsored by your local newspaper!

DAHLIAS--A Floral Heritage from Mexico

SOME flowers, like the orchid, require a conservatory in which to develop their aristocratic blossoms, but the dahlia requires merely a home garden in which to flaunt its lovely colors. In no place do dahlias appear to better advantage than clustered about a low, rambling farmhouse or in some suburban garden.

Fire!

A LOOK-OUT perches high in his tower on a peak in a western forest. Across the valley the storm cloud gathers with vivid lightning and growling thunder. The storm king, hurling his thunder bolts, rides above the high trees.

The Diary of a Plain Dirt Gardener

May2 Downtown this morning to Livingston's to buy some seeds, I found my friend Wetherby, bulb authority of the firm, had a narcissus display on a long table in front of the store, and he was hovering around it like an old hen with a lot of new chicks.

Look Out--Here Come Those Pests!

SOMETIMES garden troubles are due to definite pests, at other times to some growing condition. If your trouble is due to a specific pest, you are likely to find the insect or some definite evidence of it somewhere on or in the plant. It may be inside, or beneath the soil, on the roots.

Can You Learn Home-gardening in Your Park?

SO READS a sign at the entrance to a small garden in the Bronx Botanical Garden, New York City. How came this home garden to be set down in Bronx Park? A little sign over the entrance tells us that this is the Hill Memorial Garden. H. H. Hill had been a garden enthusiast as well as a successful businessman. When he died, his brother, Arthur Trevor Hill, searched about for a suitable way to perpetuate his memory.

The Beardless Iris at Home in Your Garden

OF ALL the tall, beardless iris which may be grown today in our gardens, the tall Siberian Iris, I believe, are finding the most favor. This deserving popularity lies in the fact that they require the minimum of effort to bring them to perfection.

Boys and Girls! Here's a Thrilling Drama You Can Stage!

TO PLANT a garden is as much fun as putting on a thrilling drama that will last all year, Junior Gardeners!

Program Plans for Right Now

TODAY one senses a strong new current in club life. Clubwomen are discarding the conventional program of other years and undertaking in its place to study outlines more definitely related to present-day living.

Your Home Service Bureau

LET US help you make your 1933 garden the best garden you've ever had! Read this partial list of Better Homes and Gardens garden leaflets. Among them you're sure to find inspiration, new ideas, and answers to many of your individual garden questions.

This is the way to

Contest Conditions

1. The Better Homes Contest begins January 1, 1933, and ends December 31, 1933. The work must be begun and finished within that period. Photographs and a 300-word letter describing the improvements you make must be mailed in an envelope which bears a postmark not later than midnight, December 31, 1933.

We Add Comfort and Beauty

OUR old home, which had served us for thirty years, was sadly in need of repair. The last coat of battleship-gray paint was now twenty years old and the wood foundation was unsound and unsightly.

We Change a Boxlike Home

OUR HOME is in a delightful section of Lowell, Massachusetts, yet its square appearance required more than shrubbery to improve it architecturally. Our original home, as you can see from the photographs on page 19, was quite boxlike, and on our narrow lot only horizontal rooflines could widen its appearance.

A Preview of Your 12-to 18-Year-Old

races. We are told that this is because our institutions have forced nature out of its mold. Savages give their children independence and marry them off at puberty, when their minds and bodies call for independence. The adolescents are not given all the privileges of the tribe until they are older, but they are released from parental dominance.

Tin Can Garden Club

FROM their second-floor apartment windows, not so long ago, Mr. and Mrs. J. A. Strom, South Park Avenue, Chicago, Illinois, could see only vacant lots, weedy in summer, heaped with ashes in winter, and graced in any season by almost mountainous piles of tin cans. With the permission of their landlord, they had already turned the next-door lot into a flower garden, but what good is a garden you can't see?

ALONG THE GARDEN PATH

HAS the past year made you realize that it is the simple happenings in your garden which after all typify the permanent features of the world? Nature has known no depression. She has gone on producing the same simple rhythms of the seasons-- the same color harmonies, and the same abundance of leaf and flower and seed.