Oriia)nenliiig Our School Yards. 437 



we can get even a suggestion for so small a matter as a wooden country 

 school house. While you have magnificent plantings on a large scale, 

 if you go to the details of these plantings you will find examples of 

 plantings where a little rustic summer-house, perhaps, has been so man- 

 tled with our ow^n native vines and so shaded with our own native trees 

 that grow in the woods about all these rural churches and school houses, 

 that you will see they can be easily duplicated from our fields and 

 orchards. You will find by looking over these grounds, and by taking 

 up these details that we can get almost any example that we want for the 

 beautification of rural buildings of that sort. It seems to me that in- 

 stead of the bareness of taste surrounding them, if they take advantage of 

 what nature has so bountifully provided in our fields and woods that 

 grow so successfully here, the farmers have the amplest means of assem- 

 bling native plants and trees which can be placed in the borders and in the 

 rear of his premises so that they would not only give shade but would 

 materially add to the beauty and comfort of his home. The Virginia 

 creeper mantling the gateways. Wisteria covering the porches, or ivy 

 draping the doorways of dwellings, school houses and churches, would 

 lend a coziness to all those places that would be of immense value to the 

 boys and girls who get so much of their life training there. That life 

 training means so much to us that I can not help saying this evening that 

 the strongest influences of our lives almost comes from these places where 

 we got our training. While I dislike to dwell on and particularize these 

 things, I can not refrain from saying that the very examples found there 

 and the arrangement of the garden, and all that, may furnish to rural 

 communities the things that they need to make an aiboretum for them- 

 selves, by gathering together the wald flowers and plants that grow all 

 over tlie state. The same work that is required to gather them up and 

 plant them, may enable the farmer to acquire much knowledge concern- 

 ing the plants and flowers and shade trees that beautify his place, and 

 a householder could not be better employed than in doing just that thing. 

 It will make those who do it more observant and careful in their ar- 

 rangement of the growing things in the fields and woods, and on their 

 farms. With the knowledge gained by coming in contact with these 

 growing things, they gradually obtain a better and better acquaintance 

 Avith them, and, consequently, learn liow best to surround their farms 



