184 MASSACHUSETTS HORTICI'LTURAL SOCIETY. 



want to find out. The children ^A•rite in connection with it because there 

 are things there that they cannot describe in words. It is because they 

 want to use these things that makes the work so effective. It connects 

 itself not only with the language, the number, and drawing, but it connects 

 itself and lays a foundation for a nuich more advanced work in the higher 

 departments of school, and I have felt veiy strongly that the school garden 

 is an essential to the high school; it is the most effective laboratory a 

 high school could use. The department of biology would be vitalized if 

 it were connected with the school garden and familiarity with the features 

 of school gardening would do as much for the study of literature, rendering 

 plain the figures of rhetoric with which literature abounds. I believe it 

 is idle for any teacher to try to teach literature by explaining in words 

 what these figures mean. Both for the high and the elementary schools 

 the school garden is to come in and will be found to be the most effective 

 and useful laboratory that can be maintained today. 



A third reason is the social side of the garden. It connects itself so 

 closely with the home life of the child. That is our one great need at 

 present. It is to be the work of the immediate future to bring the school 

 and home back into their old-time relations and I think by means of this 

 work it can be done. The children are applying at home what they have 

 learned at the school garden and this will be a means of binding the two 

 together. Such work as Mr. Hastings has done in Fitchburg is useful 

 especially in a city where perhaps a school garden may not be practicable 

 but where in every home there are opportunities for giving the children 

 the same sort of training. 



These seem to me, Mr. Chairman, the three most essential features ; the 

 fact that it appeals to the instinctive cra\dng of the child for life process, 

 the fact that it renders vital other school work, and that it tends to con- 

 nect the school and home as nothing else does. I may seem extravagant in 

 my claims but I have learned to become interested in it and every year as 

 I have watched it it has grown upon me as one of the valuable features 

 possible in public school work. 



Horticultural Education for School Garden Teachers. 



BY F. A. WAUGH, PROFESSOR OF HORTICULTURE AND LANDSCAPE GARDEN- 

 ING, M.\SS.\CHUSETTS AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE, AMHERST, MASS. 



In all the conferences on school gardens that we have held and in all 

 discussions on these topics the first practical question to come up has 

 been that of knowing how to make the garden itself. In other words the 

 horticultural question seems to be fundamental. Over and over this 

 point has been emphasized, that a school garden must be successful first 



