O PREFACE. 







were clear to me : first, that no peasant would allow his 

 son to undertake such a foolish experiment in the public 

 school as to learn to cultivate a field with plough and 

 mattock ! In the second place, I recognized more and 

 more every day what I instinctively felt on first reading 

 the law : that there should be, not only for every country 

 school but fnr every city school, a pleasure-ground j per 

 haps still more for the latter than for the former. 



WHY I WAS INTERESTED. 



I was inspecting one day the school of the little vil- 

 lage of Redweis, near Olmutz. The region around it 

 is a fruitful plain, a portion of the well-known Hanna ; 

 but far and wide I saw that, with the exception of the 

 fruit trees of the house garden, there was neither tree 

 nor shrub ; only a few trees in the streets, in a few 

 places. I pitied the children of a village, to whom the 

 contemplation of nature is so circumscribed by the pov- 

 erty of animal and plant life. As I looked out of 

 the school-room window, I saw, outside of the teacher's 

 garden, only a wide, waste piece. The thought imme- 

 diately took root in me, " here belongs a school gar- 

 den ! " And with this word I had found the key to 

 what I was seeking. On my way home the idea of what 

 this school garden must be was clear. I went imme- 

 diately to the manufacturer, Herr Max Machanek, who 

 possesses a happy talent for landscape gardening, 

 which he had made known by his good plan for the city 

 park in Olmutz, and with whom I had been visiting 

 gardens since the year 1866. For, I thought the plan 

 must not only be a good one, it must be beautiful. I 

 developed to the gifted man my thoughts about the dif- 

 ferent kinds of school gardens which had flashed 



