DouoAN ] GARDEN LESSONS IN A CITY SCHOOL 278 



Our plan has been during the past year to use garden les- 

 sons (i) to stimulate interest in the school and greater regard 

 for school property by creating a sense of proprietorship, (2) to 

 beautify the grounds so that they may become an example for the 

 neighborhood, (3) to teach the children how to beautify their 

 own homes by cultivating neglected bits of ground, (4) to de- 

 velop such a taste for garden work as may make it an avocation 

 in later years. 



Last October the head gardener for the Board of Education 

 supplied us with plants enough to fill a four-foot window-box for 

 each room. With the study and care of these we began. Then 

 when the cannas and salvias were removed from the large beds 

 in front of the building, we began out of doors. The gardener 

 supplied us with tulip and hyacinth bulbs sufficient to fill the 

 vacant space and furnish work for the entire two hundred child- 

 ren in our second grade. An indoor lesson illustrated with 

 diagrams on the structure of the bulbs, the correct position for 

 planting and depth for covering, was given in each room. The 

 diagram of the bed was put on the board exactly as laid out on 

 the ground and under the teacher's direction the children did the 

 planting. Bulbs lent themselves well to the instruction of little 

 children in planting — downward growth of root and upward 

 growth of stem — and each child, with a wooden label, marked 

 his own for future care and observation. Some upper grade 

 boys hauled manure to mulch and fertilize half of one bed. 

 The other remaining uncovered, all had good opportunity to 

 compare the spring growth on the two halves. Besides, it was 

 good for the two sets of boys to be brought into cooperation. 



During the winter our privet hedge was frozen to the ground, 

 and when spring came and the buds started below, a class of 

 fourth-grade boys with their jackknives cut out all the dead 

 twigs, besides clearing away the rubbish. A little later a group 

 of eighth-grade boys, with the help of a man assigned by the head 

 gardener to have general care of the grounds for the summer, 

 cut and hauled sods to cover a spot as large as a schoolroom. 

 This spot, in the angle between two walks, had, because of poor 

 soil and much tramping, utterly refused to grow grass. Now it 

 is a beauty spot and scarcely a foot has stepped on it this fall. 



When Arbor Day came, our seventh and eighth grades 

 planted new groups of shrubbery partly furnished by the Board's 

 gardener and partly donated by the Missouri Botanical Garden. 

 They also replenished the older groups where shrubs had died. 



