i6o6 The Cornell Reading Courses 



a variety of color schemes from month to month, which would make a 

 decorative feature on the outside of the house, and which would be ready- 

 to add its quota to the special occasion in home, church, or town. There 

 are plants, such as hollyhocks, foxglove, and some other border plants 

 and shrubs, that should not be asked to spare their flowers for any ordinary 

 occasion, but when placed within view of the windows such flowers help 

 to complete the adornment of the room. 



The school may also have its garden. There is a wonderful sense of 

 proprietorship in the flowers brought up by hand in the school yard. 

 Here again formal beds and garden plots are not desirable. Flowering 

 plants are much more decorative when planted near fences and steps, or 

 beside walks, walls, and buildings. If seed catalogues were carefully 

 studied in the winter, and if each child or a group of children were respon- 

 sible for flowers certain weeks in spring and fall, what joyous lessons in 

 gardening, in color, and in design might result! Hardy perennials 

 that are early or late bloomers would be the better choices, of course; 

 otherwise arrangement must be made for the care of the plants during 

 the long vacation. It would be better to have no plants at all than for the 

 children to grow weary and leave a group of famished flowers to testify to 

 a passing alTection. 



Nowhere are flowers more appropriate than in the church. Here 

 the scale or the size of the flower arrangement is an important consideration. 

 The charming little nosegay suitable at home is entirely lost in this larger 

 place. Only large blossoms or sprays are adapted to church decoration; 

 therefore, when the garden is planned it should include not only small, 

 intimate flowers, but some of a bolder nature. 



The fields and woods. — The school, with its many eager messengers, 

 can easily depend for its decorative material on field, forest, mountain, 

 and meadow. The supply is boundless, the season a complete circle. 

 Experience teaches, however, that some flowers, which are exquisite in 

 their native haunts, do not lend themselves happily to the conventional 

 environment of the interior of buildings. Children should be taught 

 what flowers to gather and how to gather those. 



Any one who has an extended acquaintance with children or with 

 schools, is familiar with the bunches of flowers gathered, short-stemmed 

 and leafless, by eager little perspiring hands and brought as offerings of 

 devotion to the teacher, who crowds them all — ■ violets and buttercups, 

 sturdy growths and dainty growths — into one receptacle, where color and 

 form flght with each other and not even the fittest survive. One teacher 

 takes her children on a collecting expedition, but instead of handfuls of 

 flowers they bring home mental pictures. After studying the flowers 

 carefully in the places where they grow, they shut their eyes and describe 



