STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY, II3 



•of fruit culture. He who has learned to make the plant or tree 

 grow, has gone far in learning the art or science of growing 

 fruit. Much remains to be learned even then, so it may always 

 "be a pleasant duty for the Pomological Society to teach still 

 more of the mysteries of plant life, that the young people as they 

 learn other things may also learn well the lesson of fruit 

 jgrowing. 



SCHOOL GARDENS. 



By Dick J. Crosby, 



Expert on Agricultural Institutions, Ofifice of Experiment 

 Stations, U. S. Department of Agriculture. 



The school garden is just now attracting a great deal of atten- 

 tion among educators, and rightly so. As an elementary 

 feature of our rapidly growing system of agricultural education 

 it has as much right to be as have the Sloyd room, cooking 

 laboratory, and sewing room of our manual training courses. 



School gardens are modern institutions but they have come to 

 stay. No concerted movement for their establishment dates 

 back more than thirty-five years. Aside from Germany where 

 two or three states gave encouragement to the establishment of 

 school gardens over eighty years ago. Austria and Sweden 

 ^'ere leaders in the movement and were practically contempo- 

 raneous in giving official encouragement to it. These countries 

 were followed by Belgium, Switzerland, France, and Russia in 

 the official establishment and promotion of school gardens. The 

 German government has not taken up this work in an official 

 Avay, but through local initiative a great many excellent school 

 gardens are being maintained, among them some of the best we 

 have in the world. 



In the United States school gardens w^ere unknown twelve 

 years ago ; now they are found in fourteen or fifteen different 

 •states, and in perhaps fifty or seventy-five different cities and 

 towns. What was probably the first school garden in the United 

 States was started in 1891 at the George Putnam Grammar 

 School, Boston, by Henry L. Clapp, master of the school. For 

 nine years this garden was devoted exclusively to wild flowers. 



