CHAPTER VIII 



garden studies 



Home and School Gardens 



Spacious and fair is the world ; yet oh ! how I thank the kind heavens 

 That I a garden possess, small though it be, yet mine own. 

 One which enticeth me homewards ; why should a gardener wander ? 

 Honor and pleasure he finds, when to his garden he looks. 



Goethe. 



Each of the children of the German emperor has a 

 garden of his own in which he works and sees plants 

 grow from his own sowing, and learns innumerable things 

 that books and the best of instructors could never teach. 



When we consider the fundamental relations of the race 

 to the soil and its culture and products, and when we 

 remember that the establishment of these relations con- 

 stituted the greatest uplift of the race toward civilization, 

 we realize that to leave soil lore out of a plan of public 

 education is likely to prove reversion toward barbarism. 

 The vandalism, juvenile and even adult, that renders 

 pursuit of horticulture in a New England city or town 

 well-nigh impossible must be accounted a first fruit of 

 this unwise neglect. ^ It would also seem that failure 



1 Recent studies ('Flynt) have shown that our tramps are the natural 

 product of our school system, not foreign born, as we are commonly 

 tempted to suppose. Their manner of life demonstrates with remarkable 

 force a reversion to nomadic ways. 



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