ELEMENTARY BOTANY 



105 



have our rarest and most beautiful flowers so completely 

 exterminated near our towns and cities that few ever see 

 them blooming. A strong feature of this work may well 

 be the beautifying of roadsides with as great a variety of 

 wild flowers as possible, and a good rule will be, not to 

 pluck any roadside Jioivers. Leave them for passers-by 

 to enjoy, and gather only from private fields where permis- 

 sion is granted and only such flowers as are superabundant. 

 This will leave no reason for complaints, often raised, that 

 interesting thoughtless children in the study of flowers 

 results in their wanton extermination. 



Wayside songs and meadow blossoms ; nothing perfect, nothing rare; 

 Every poet's ordered garden yields a hundred flowers more fair; 

 Master-singers know a music richer far beyond compare. 



Yet the reaper in the harvest, 'mid the burden and the heat, 

 Hums a half remembered ballad, finds the easy cadence sweet, — 

 Sees the very blue of heaven in the corn-bloom at his feet. 



Van Dyke, The Builders^ p. 42. 



While the flower calendar may be repeated from year 

 to year, and even increase in interest by repetition, it 

 will not consume the time nor supply all the work 

 desirable with our flora. Some flowers must be studied 

 more thoroughly than others, and to avoid confusion and 

 repetition from year to year in this work, we need to 

 have a concerted plan understood and agreed upon by 

 the teachers of a town or city, with plants assigned to 

 each grade. Such an assignment is made in the year 

 and grade plan at the end of this book and need not 

 be repeated here. It is designed especially to include 

 the flowers that every child in New England ought to 



