APPLIED GARDEN LESSONS IN A CITY SCHOOL 



By LEWIS M. DOUGAN, Principal Shaw Public School St. Louis, Mo. 



If the reader would get the significance as well as the facts 

 of the garden work in the Shaw School, let him imagine a superb 

 new building on a five-acre site overlooking in the distance a 

 half-dozen smoke-belching factories for the manufacture of clay 

 and iron products ; nearer by, the small houses of the workers in 

 these industries, many of them not long since from Italy or 

 Sicily. Let him fancy miles of unpaved and unsewered streets 

 intersecting the district, and on every hand vacant lots waiting 

 for other civic improvements to catch up with those of our pro- 

 gressive Board of Education. Meanwhile let these lots be over- 

 grown with the flora of the waste place, a tangle of bidens, goose- 

 foots, amaranths and cockle-burs. In striking contrast, let there 

 be within the district boundaries the beauty spot of the city, 



SHAW PUBLIC SCHOOL, ST. LOUIS, MO. 



the Missouri Botanical Garden, and within easy walking distance, 

 the two largest and most beautiful parks in the city — lands almost 

 unknown to some people in the district. Let most of the rich 

 black soil be scraped from the site, and in the yellow subsoil thus 

 exposed let shrubs and trees be planted in the park-like design. 

 How to develop this large school site and make it help to fit for 

 life the children of this semi-foreign, semi-rural community — 

 this has been our problem. 



