March 1939

ACROSS THE Editor's Desk

WHEREVER we find gardens we also hear song and laughter; we find happiness and a true, enduring expression of the arts. And can anyone explain why men and women in troublous times seek out the quietude of a garden, where their fears can be soothed by the music of Canterbury-bells tinkling to the velvety metronome of the rose swaying in the breeze?

TATTLE TALES

The Picture on the Cover: This home of the Dr. Willard McEwens, Better Homes & Gardens readers of Kenilworth, Illinois, an interesting contrast to the growing popularity of all-white homes, is, in itself, an excellent example of the possibilities of contrast-- white against brown.

THE DIARY of a Plain Dirt Gardener

Mar. 1 It never fails. Every time I get ready to work outdoors, Maggie shows up to inform me that the ashes need to be taken out of the basement. So that's the kind of garden work I did this bright spring afternoon. Then she reminded me that we needed more kindling for fireplace use.

GENERAL ELECTRIC

IT'S NEWS TO ME!

Coal burns brightly in a fireplace fuel basket of cast iron that sits on its four legs in your fireplace, has bottom grates easy to operate from the outside with a poker. Thus you may shake down ashes, to freshen the flame, without dumping the fire. With ends removed, the basket cradles logs of any length.

Start Lawns Right--Right Now

I'M a nurseryman. I've been one for more than 35 years. And in all those years, two questions have been drummed into my ears: ''What's wrong with my lawn? How can I get a better stand of grass?"

Easter Parades to November

THE ideal for every good garden, as for every royal family, is Unbroken Succession-- a plot that flares into bloom, at least here and there, in early March and just goes right along from glory to glory till black frost in November. And, of course, the farther south you live, the earlier and later will your garden bloom.

JUST FOUR WALLS

WALLS do things to me. Sometimes they stagger me with their noisy designs, or close in on me somberly, or set me dizzily to counting spots and stripes. Then I'm no good as a guest. I fall over my feet, spill my tea, and forget names.

Lumbermen Whittle Costs

STEADY work at $35 a week puts you in America's upper one third, along with Rockefeller, Ford, and Charlie McCarthy. It lets you make a pretty fair go of things almost anywhere in the country. Spent cautiously, it buys an automobile, a refrigerator, and a radio that enables Adolph Hitler and the Shadow to scare you witless right in your own living-room.

HOBBY CULTURE

YOU'RE never quite the same after your first sightseeing trip to New York, but often while waiting for a green light at a Fifth Avenue corner, I've wished I could organize sightseeing groups just to go admiring some of Manhattan's splendid hobbyists.

Ten Sure Steps to Early Spring Bloom

What could any of us have a finger in, anyway, that is closer to sheer magic than seed-sowing? We send letters off at the speed of the modern post and back come tough brown envelopes out of which we eagerly pull seeds that come from everywhere-- wee grains which grow into flaming silken poppies from Iceland; gentians and columbines from the Alps, Japan, the Rockies, and Tibet; monkshoods and lilies from China; alyssums from the Pyrenees; zinnias and dahlias from Mexico; sunny-faced little primroses from under moist English hedgerows.

For a Reader in Rome, N. Y.

Why don't you show plans and exteriors of houses containing four or five bedrooms without such luxuries as several baths?

Trimmed Down to Today

MARCH Indoor Gardening Guide

ARE you one of those houseplantless persons who makes the excuse, "I just don't have a green thumb. Plants won't grow for me as they did for mother. Everything she touched became green and healthy."

MARCH Outdoor Gardening Guide

YOU and your garden feel the urge of spring in March. You itch to sink your spade deep and turn the earth. You know that lots of gardening can be done much earlier than most people believe, even in Minnesota and Vermont. Yet March gives the less enthusiastic plenty of alibis: the soil is too wet, the ground too cold. ...

When Old and New Combine Harmoniously--THAT'S NEWS!

SWEEPING into nationwide prominence comes an exciting new furniture style called Kentwood a delightful compromise between the exquisite grace of Eighteenth-Century furniture and the practical simplicity of Modern.

Brush Up on BRUSHES

WHO'S seen the stair brush?" (or the radiator brush or the push broom), you bark irritably as you stalk thru kitchen and hallways, glaring into dark corners, jerking open doors. If you're lucky you find it eventually-- in the basement where most household cleaning equipment seems to gravitate.

I Keep House With a Memory Board

WHEN friends say to me, as frequently they do, "Of course, you can do it. You're such a crack manager!" I inevitably feel like Rastus in his coffin, at whom Dinah wanted to peek, to see if it really was he that all the eulogies were about.

We Parents

Generally it's not the sickness as much as the convalescence that distracts parents. So here's a surprise package plan.

The House That Color Makes

WHY do passers-by look, and then delightedly look again at the Richard Denny home on Nacoochee Drive in Atlanta, Georgia? It's a rambling California Colonial house, but there's nothing very novel about that.

Fairy Tale Basement

The Man Next Door

With all the vitamins, the cod- liver oil, and the science splashed around by us modern parents, I sometimes think modern children are paler and thinner than we and our playmates were as tots ... especially the little boys. ...But perhaps we forget the pallors of the past.

Freshman Gardener

IF YOU think maybe you'd like to garden this year, but you say to yourself, "I'm so ignorant about gardening I hate to ask anyone just where to start and what to do," then this story is for you.

The Eatin' o' the Green

THE cult of the raw green vegetable has grown so enormously in the past 10 years that it finally has symptoms of getting out of hand.

GENERAL ELECTRIC

On the Shady Side

Private Life of Robin Redbreast

"ROBINS? "Oh yes, I love them, those beautiful red- breasted songsters that lay blue eggs and feed upon worms."

THE Air Conditioned NORTH COAST LIMITED

Come Eat in Our Closet!

Here's an Idea!

I USED to call it the "chuck room" --that unlovely cubbyhole into which all the discards from our household went. I'd go in periodically and ponder over what a lot of new furniture and a skillful interior decorator could do for the old dump. But those pleasant luxuries just weren't in the budget, and that was that.

Don't Bequeath That Home Mortgage!

YES, life insurance has been streamlined, too. Among today's insurance contracts are some especially designed to pay off that home mortgage at the lowest possible cost. Too often we fail to insure against this liability because we don't know how cheaply it can be done.

Live in the Great Northwest?

A Mother's Garden

It's Plain to See . . .

KICKED fair in the head again is the theory that planting home grounds is "fine if you can afford it." These pictures are graphic proof that planting booms real-estate values so sharply you can't afford not to plant.

DAD'S Practical Pointers

Alex Cumming, Jr., MUM MAN

AS A gangling, Scottish-born youth of 16, Alex Cumming stood in the garden of his Pennsylvania home place and watched old-favorite chrysanthemums shrivel under the early November frosts.

Along the Garden Path

MICE and marigolds, as a general thing, form a combination as incongruous as ice cream and pepper, or peanut butter and vinegar.