THE COBBET SCHOOL GARDEN. 225 



is open to a school garden in this line. Our catalogue accompanies this 

 report and details the scope of our plans, their method and purposes. 



The quality of our work is attested by the exchanges we have readily 

 arranged, not only with citizens who have fine gardens, but also with pro- 

 fessional gardeners and nurserymen. Mr. Goodwin, the florist, whose 

 greenhouses adjoin the school yard noticed the Helenium and Boltonia 

 in our propagating bed and asked that he might purchase several clumps 

 of each sort. Two clumps of Pulmonaria saccharata maculata were formed 

 by division in the spiing, and this fall they were exchanged at the well- 

 known Reading Nurseries for ten species of hardy plants to the catalogue 

 value of .$1.50. 



While some spaces in the hardy garden were filled this year with gladioli, 

 montbretias, tigridias and like bulbs, these will have to be placed in another 

 bed next spring, their places being taken by a yariety of hardy plants. 

 Not only are new hardy plants being introduced to fill vacant places, 

 inferior varieties are being removed to make space for the best obtainable 

 forms. For example,' most of our clumps of phlox were old-fashioned 

 varieties from Lynn gardens, vigorous plants but of sober colors. By 

 purchase and exchange we have secured the best to replace them and have 

 also started over fifty clumps of five sorts in our new nursery bed. The 

 old clumps have been divided and ha^e been awarded to pupils in the dis- 

 trict where gardens are few and where the hardiest of plants are necessary 

 for the best results. Similarly some fifty clumps of bulbs of the ordinary 

 show and pompon dahlias will be divided another spring for use in the 

 same district. Some of the finest cactus, fancy, and decorative varieties 

 have been secured to replace them. In time the superior varieties now 

 being introduced in all lines will be ready for prize distribution in their 

 turn. We here wish to acknowledge a generous gift of canna and iris bulbs 

 from the Hunnewell estate, Wellesley, through the gardener, Mr. T. D. 

 Hatfield. 



The school garden not only supplies plants for home gardens but stimu- 

 lates and trains the pupils to plant individual gardens and to improve their 

 home grounds. As last year, many dollars' worth of seeds were purchased 

 for the children in cent packages, and we have commenced the policy of 

 buying the most popular sorts in pound lots and retailing them at cost in 

 quantities to suit the children. During the present week the children of 

 the building, over eight hundred in number, have written stories of their 

 home gardens for the year; and if the committee desires I will forward all 

 or a selection of hundreds or dozens of papers to you. As an example of 

 this work, which is really part and parcel of the school garden plans, I 

 record the effort toward home yard improvement of two little boys who 

 were in our school last spring but are now in the next ward. Their parents 

 were born "within the pale" in Russian Poland and their home is in a 

 dreary, cheerless building in a poor quarter, while the little back yard, 

 strewn with stones, broken glass and tins about a dilapidated outhouse 



