January 1937

ACROSS THE Editor's Desk

EARLY last autumn Christine Holbrook, of our editorial staff, visited Jamestown, Virginia, and while there purchased two pots of ivy which she brought home for her window garden. Whether this ivy was of the original plantings of the colonists or not, she will always feel that it bears some of the faint fragrance of early American tradition.

A LITTLE HOME IN SCALE

THE DIARY OF A PLAIN DIRT GARDENER

When I was young and foolish, I used to devote much space in my diary at the beginning of a new year to telling of all my hopes and fears and plans and dreams and troubles and joys and what not-- trying to put down a record whereby posterity might know that I was a philosopher. Well, in beginning this year, I'm not in a frame of mind to do anything of that sort at all.

IT'S NEWS TO ME!

"WHAT I need," Nick queried John Normile, "is some product to waterproof the basement walls."

YOUR HOME DOLLARS WILL GROW

"IT CAN'T happen again!" you said in the early nineteen-twenties. But it will happen again.

BUILT FROM BILDCOST GARDENED HOME PLANS

WE ORIGINATED and introduced Better Homes & Gardens' Bildcost Gardened-Home Plan-- a complete home-building service available from the Meredith Publishing Company only-- in January, 1932, saying, "The success of the service will be measured solely by the number of satisfied home-owners who build homes from Bildcost Plans."

A MODERN Hacienda

OFFERING complete privacy to every member of the family for both outdoor and indoor living, the patio of this Better Homes & Gardens Bildcost Gardened Home not only creates an ideal spot for resting and lounging, but makes virtually every room a garden.

APARTMENT IN THE COUNTRY

"MOVING to the country" usually means momentous changes in our way of living. I'm not just thinking of rural conditions, which may involve anything from minor annoyances to downright discomfort at times-- a fair enough price to pay for the pleasure of it, after all. If the move is from an apartment to a house, a more expansive scale of life seems almost inevitable, with several times as much space and a corresponding increase in work and responsibility.

Did you sleep well last night?

WHEN somebody poses the question, the chances are you'll answer, "Oh, yes, slept as well as usual," and let it go at that. But actually that should be just the beginning. So many of us are used to sleeping "as well as usual" that until we're seriously troubled by broken sleep, insomnia, or that tired, dragged-out feeling in the morning, we never pause to consider what a good night's rest actually means.

COLOR WHERE TO HAVE IT HOW TO USE IT

THERE'S an old saying that blue homes make blue brides and crying babies. Of course, it doesn't happen to be true most of the time. Some of the loveliest rooms I've seen had a cool, dominant note of soft off-blue, with warmer colors for accents. But the truth the old saying does point to is that an over-dose of any one color around you can very definitely affect your feelings.

YOUR FLOOR COVERING? Let the Furniture Decide

SING A SONG OF BUILT-INS

YES, "sing a song of built-ins" if you would find your home more efficient and marked by that distinction which comes from an ingenious understanding of how to make waste space work for you.

CAPTIVATING CLOSETS

Closets Are an Index to Character. Some great man ought to have said that, tho I don't think one ever did. But after prowling about in dark and cluttered cubbyholes, treading on my hostesses' evening slippers and knocking down their pet hats while I explored for my coat, I've become practically fanatical on the subject.

My Garden Leads a DOUBLE LIFE

MY GARDEN starts out to be very prim, a garden quite in keeping with the four-square sturdiness of my Cape Cod cottage. Neither the lamp-post at the fence corner nor the clipped yews by the railed stoop give any hint of what's going on behind their strait-laced formality. Even the hedge that lines the graveled driveway and the American Cranberrybush that veils the corner suggest conventionality.

WHY NOT A HOBBY GARDEN?

MUCH of the joy of gardening comes from the pleasant anticipation of things to be accomplished when spring unlocks the soil. Then circles on paper become live trees or shrubs and sketches of borders become banks of colorful perennials.

New Annuals THAT MADE GOOD

EXPERIMENTING with new annuals is one of my most enjoyable gardening adventures. Each season brings novelties that seem more entrancing than any that have gone before. There are new forms of old favorites, new color combinations, new hybrids, and even varieties long listed but never tried.

BAGDAD-ON-THE-SUBWAY

SOONER or later, believe it or not, you'll be coming to New York. Oh yes, you will! Everybody does. It is said that about 30,000 strangers pour into the Big Town daily. They want to see, hear, taste, smell, soak in it, and maybe get soaked by it. It's all things to all men. And even those who say they don't like it come back for more, drawn by a spell they can't explain.

THE MAN NEXT DOOR

Many women, alas, seem to dress with the intention of distracting attention from themselves with their clothes-- as certain fussy young matrons conceal a telephone with a crinoline doll, or disguise a radio as books.

The Question Before the House

IN THE second-floor bathroom we hear a heavy knocking sound when the faucet is turned off. What is the cause, and can it be corrected?

LET'S BUILD A CORNER CUPBOARD

INTO the heart of almost every homemaker there comes, sometime, the desire to have a Colonial cupboard or a pair of them, if the dining-room is so arranged as to permit.

The Butterfly Table

IF YOU'RE observing you've seen this table before. The original design appeared in a photograph in Better Homes & Gardens some time ago as a part of the furnishings of a very comfortable-looking room, and it looked so interesting I thought you might like to build it.

FOR NEW HOMES, REMODELED HOMES, BETTER KITCHENS

THIS year, 1937, is going to be a home year. Everywhere-- at the theater, in clubs, on trains, in homes-- a subject of absorbing interest is the home. On every hand one hears such home-hearted talk as this:

VENETIAN VIANDS

THERE came the subdued swish of our gondolier's oar as the craft skimmed along the happy, fluid thorofare of the Grand Canal. No brakes, no barking taxis, no traffic tie-ups to encroach on our reveries. Passing barcas were piled high with coalblack, velvet grapes; others with pumpkins, pomegranates. cabbages, tomatoes, pears-- pyramids of gold and green and scarlet.

The Dish of the Month

THOSE merry little berries are here again! First in the list of good things submitted in the Dish of the Month Contest announced in October is Cranberry Pot Roast, hot, ruddy, and packed full of flavor. Its author-- Eva Meyers, Hobart, Indiana. Her Pot Roast follows, also other winners of the Better Homes & Gardens' Certificate of Recipe Endorsement:

YES, I KEEP A DIARY

SOME years ago I started writing in my journal a full account of those problems which stumped me as far as my youngsters were concerned. Slipped in, of course, are "bright sayings" and other anecdotal treasures I just can't depend on my faulty memory to preserve.

"TAKE ITS Temperature"

"A GOOD cook tastes," we're told. But isn't cookery an art demanding a delicate sense of smell, of sound, of touch, of sight as well? In fact, all five senses and a good measure of that sixth sense or instinct, common sense, go into making the business of eating a pleasure.

Easy Upkeep vs.

Resolve!

AS THE old year draws near its end we-- most of us-- make resolutions for the new year. We make them on how to manage our business, our families, ourselves, perhaps our friends. Why, then, do we not make garden resolutions?

Meet Jack's Cousins

PERKY Jack-in-the-pulpit, as you know, grows in damp places along with his broad- leaved, socially outcast relative, the Skunk-cabbage. These familiar plants are but two of a large and cosmopolitan botanical family whose members are collectively called aroids.

ALONG THE GARDEN PATH

NOT long ago, in the garden section of a metropolitan newspaper, I ran across a bit that posed as advice but which, to me, revealed an unmistakable whiff of Limburger.