176 THE PI.ANT WORIvD 



The Wild Flower Preservation Society 



of America. 



PROTECTION OF THE WILD FLOWERS.* 



By G. Gordon Copp. 



Efficient protection of the wild flowers will be best accomplished, and 

 most fully accomplished, when every lover of nature adds his mite of 

 effort to the gracious task, demonstrating a wide-spread interest in the 

 subject. 



The fields of endeavor must be as broad as the wildwoods that the 

 Wild Flower Preservation Society of America would protect, and the 

 methods of protection as numerous as the plants the society would pre- 

 serve, and yet but one plan presents itself to me as preeminently important. 



Enlist the services of the school teachers as the most serviceable of 

 allies and through them reach the children, with whom the future of the 

 wild flowers rests in far greater degree than with their elders. 



My school days were over long before the school teachers of New York 

 were expected to convert each member of a most cosmopolitan class into 

 botanist and geologist, artist and artizan, nature student and linguist, 

 regardless of previous condition, nationality or temperament. 



Consequently, my first introduction to botany was through the kindly 

 offices of a young country school teacher, at an age considerably past the 

 schoolboy period, when I could best appreciate real beauty of face and 

 form and mind. 



I^et me confess she possessed all three to a marked degree. This I dis- 

 tinctly remember, but all that remains to me of her botanical instruction 

 is the recollection that I armed her with a razor to aid in her researches 

 afield on her return to her country charges. 



Even then I loved the wild flowers too well to enjoy dissecting them, 

 and with the additional disadvantages of the teacher's absence, multiple 

 regrets totally foreign to botany, and the impression that the delightful 

 study was mainly based on the destruction of all things rare and beautiful 

 to be studied, is it strange that botanical knowledge halted with me there ? 



I have since learned much on lines less destructive, and to me far 

 pleasanter. So would say, beyond all things urge the teachers to relegate 

 the dissecting knife to the realms of tools of last resort, and their use to 



* Awarded the third prize of ten dollars, competition of 1904, from the Caroline and Olivia Phelps- 

 Stokes Fund for the Preservation of Native Plants. Reprinted from the Journal of the New York 

 Botanical Garden. 



