146 THE NATURE-STUDY IDEA 



It is always advisable, when it can be arranged, to 

 provide for some culmination or focus of the 

 season's work in the nature of a flower-show or 

 vegetable-show ; or, the children may be allowed 

 to sell the products of their gardens or to give 

 them to hospitals or other worthy objects. This 

 individuality of interest can be easily maintained in 

 the plot-garden, but it is more difficult in the 

 ornamental garden in which the plants are grown 

 in continuous borders. 



In order to indicate how some of the questions 

 are attacked by those who are engaged in the 

 work, I reprint an article on the Whittier School- 

 Garden, by Miss Jean E. Davis, that appeared 

 recently in Country Life in America : 



"What is believed to be the largest school- 

 garden in the United States is to be found in 

 Virginia at the Hampton Institute for Negro and 

 Indian youth, where it forms part of the equipment 

 of the Whittier Training School the practice- 

 school of the institution. Two acres of ground 

 are given up to the garden, the larger part being 

 divided into two hundred individual plots, varying 

 in size from four by six feet for the pickaninnies of 

 the kindergarten, to eleven by fifteen feet for the old- 

 est boys and girls. Each plot is owned, for the time 

 being, by two children, who enter into partner- 

 ship and share equally in the work as well as in the 

 profits of the garden spading, raking, planting, 

 hoeing, harvesting with their own hands, and using 

 the products in their own homes or selling them to 

 their neighbors. The young farmers are not given 



