CIVIC GARDENING


garden as a whole as well as of their individual crops. Curiously
enough, the girls, like good housewives, preferred the vegetables-
the boys, the flowers. If a child was absent, there were always any
number of others who would willingly weed the plot for the sheer
pleasure of it-and perhaps in the hope of securing an assignment
next year.
   The neighbors enjoyed this garden immensely. They stood in
rows along the hedge watching the little tillers of the soil; they came
at dusk and walked down the garden pathway, and one old man was
a daily visitor all through the season.
   A most interesting civic development has grown out of the back-
yard contest, for from these scattered gardens has come the "block
idea." Recently, the members of Block Improvement Association
Number One celebrated the taking down of the last high board fence
on St. Paul Street, Baltimore. For many years some of the back-
yards had been planted to grass and flowers, but it was not until
wire fences had become uniform that the residents in the block could
take real pleasure in their neighbors' gardens. Vines and shrubs
provide secluded nooks for serving tea or for the afternoon siesta,
but the general effect is that of a park rather than a series of minia-
ture gardens. In another block, one of the residents has built an
ornamental stone wall in such a way that it allows the passerby
glimpses of climbing roses and blossoming shrubs, while a little bal-
cony porch, shut in from the street and neighbors, looks out upon
a charming vista of green. Thus the block development idea is grow-
ing in Baltimore, and undoubtedly this kind of coperation will bring
more comfortable homes and incidentally more valuable ones. It is
a significant fact that on streets where there are empty houses, it is
always the garden blocks that are filled.
   Various methods have been used to popularize this civic garden
work. In the spring of nineteen hundred and twelve, a set of colored
slides was shown in all the large moving picture theaters of the city,
and a lecturer explained the work of the Committee. In this way
thousands of persons were informed of the garden possibilities in their
backyards, in window-boxes and in vacant lots. Everywhere the
policemen were interested, one of the contestants last year having
been the traffic officer stationed at a prominent down-town inter-
section of streets.
ERHAPS the most effective publicity agency of the Baltimore
     garden movement, and certainly the most profitable one, is the
     Annual Flower Market held around the Washington Monument
early in May. Here are sold all kinds of plants, tools and garden
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