238 MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



On account of the wetness of the season the plants as a whole 

 have made exceptionally fine growths, especially the asters and 

 golden-rods. 



REPORT OF THE MEDFORD SCHOOL GARDENS. 



Having once more become associated with the schools of Med- 

 ford, I have during the past year made an effort to improve the 

 Swan School Garden, and have added a large number of native 

 plants to its flora. 



Through the generosity of the Maiden Park Commissioners I 

 have been able to enrich the garden, especially the fern beds, with 

 some twenty-five loads of peat mould from Fellsmere, and over 

 two hundred fern roots, interspersed with asters and golden-rods, 

 of different species, have been massed in the beds along the shady 

 side of the fences. The rockery has been restocked with hepaticas, 

 blood-roots, columbines, herb Robert, and other rock-loving plants, 

 with polypodiums, woodsias, marginal shield fern and Christmas 

 fern, and several choice native shrubs have been added to the 

 garden. As, however, I intend adding others in the spring, and 

 contemplate making still further efforts to establish the garden on 

 a permanent basis of usefulness for nature study in the school, I 

 shall not submit a special report for this year. 



I wish, however, to call the attention of the Committee to the 

 Curtis School Garden, which is beginning to assume proportions 

 that entitle it to the highest consideration of this Committee. 



Under the able supervision of Miss Amy Jones, the principal of 

 the school, and her assistant. Miss Laura Davenport (one of the 

 pioneers of nature work in the Medford schools), the garden has 

 developed from a very modest beginning into a strong competitor 

 for one of the prizes offered by this Committee, and bids fair to 

 become a still more formidable one in the near future. 



A large portion of the garden has been devoted to the usual gar- 

 den flowers for the pleasure of the children, — a practice which I 

 believe to be a wise one where only young children of the first, 

 second, and third grades are concerned, — but some twelve native 

 trees and shrubs and upward of fifty species of native flowering 

 plants and ferns have been grown and made use of in the nature 

 work in the school. Some of the nature work done from studies 

 of these native plants by some of the youngest pupils in the school 



