INTRODUCTION 1 1 



The social life of a whole family may easily center around 

 the garden. A young girl living in one of the few remaining 

 dwelling houses now standing in the business section of a 

 city tells a charming story of their home garden. It slipped 

 out quite casually one day in the botany class, through an 

 endeavor to ■ persuade her classmates to plant flowers on 

 their roofs. To show how well this would work, she drew a 

 little picture of their own family life. 



There were nine children. The father had always gone 

 daft over his flower garden, and the children were worthy 

 scions ; but bit by bit the land around them was sliced away 

 and nearly all the sun was shut out by high buildings. At 

 last they agreed to transfer their garden to the shed roof. So 

 the neighborhood was scoured for boxes six feet or more 

 in length. Then took place the exciting ceremony of hoisting 

 these boxes up onto the roof. The best arrangement for them 

 had already been discussed. In readiness for planting they 

 had contrived to raise seedlings and slips by putting them 

 under the skylight — the only place where the sun could 

 stream in. These boxes of plantlets the children would run 

 upstairs several times a day to adjust so that the rays should 

 always strike just right. It was plain to see that, besides the 

 joy of the work itself, this garden, like many another, gave 

 opportunity for the interplay between young minds and old, 

 and on more or less equal terms. Such opportunities, if we 

 stop to think, occur too seldom, particularly in these days 

 when interests, and especially pleasures, are so largely strati- 

 fied according to age. It is self-evident that the girl in this 

 particular botany class, who owned a garden, would have a 

 much more solid foundation for knowledge than the rest, 

 who had learned their facts from mere detached schoolroom 

 specimens, no matter how carefully these might have been 

 selected for them by a teacher. 



