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NATURE STUDY AND LIFE 



In the general movement toward active education 

 manual training, cooking, and sewing have made rapid 

 progress toward assured positions in the curriculum, 

 while the most wholesome and educative work of all, 

 work in the fresh air and sunshine, with the soil and 

 growing things, practical gardening, has lagged behind. 

 In Europe, according to Mr. Clapp, there are eighty-one 

 thousand school gardens from Sweden to Switzerland. 

 As long ago as 1887 a decree was passed in France by 

 which no plan of a school building could be accepted 

 unless a school garden was attached. " The absence of 

 the school garden is the most radical defect in our ele- 

 mentary education." ^ 



The form a school garden should take, the things 

 planted in it, and the sphere of its influence in the educa- 

 tion of a neighborhood must, of course, vary with local 

 needs and conditions. Where home gardens are lacking 

 or neglected, nothing can so awaken the children to the 

 resources and possibilities of life and nature. In one 

 case over 80 per cent of the children started gardens 

 of their own at home, and many of the parents, mostly 

 foreigners, sought information through the teachers as 

 to where seeds and garden supplies could be obtained. 



Even where home gardens are all that could be wished 

 or desired, the school garden can furnish opportunities for 

 such class lessons in soils, soil preparation, and fertilization, 

 methods of planting seeds, methods of propagating fruit 

 and forest trees by seeds, cuttings, buds, grafts, and layers, 

 as will be described under those topics, — pruning, thinning 

 fruit, insects, and fungous diseases. A wild-flower garden 



1 Henry Lincoln Clapp, in Education, May, 1901. 



