February, 1910 



THE GARDEN MAGAZINE 



25 



Class B had some close rivals with South End 

 Industrial School, Roxbury, and North Adams 

 Normal School leading off. Massachusetts cer- 

 tainly showed up well for Wellesley, Great Barring- 

 ton, and Melrose, besides these first two competitors, 

 sent in reports and pictures of excellent work. 

 Melrose garden was the only one entered which was 

 under the management of the local Women's Club. 



Public School 84, Long Island City, has taken 

 a small strip of land in the school yard and has 

 made, under the existing conditions, one of the best 

 city school gardens we have seen. 



A next year's rival to watch out for is a school in 

 Ontario, Canada. The work here is amazingly 

 fine in its niceness and finish. They learned of 

 our competition too late to enter this year. 



Division C 



This class had fewer contestants and closer com- 

 petition than the other classes. To be mentioned 

 with praise is a little school in Ardonia, New York, 

 where the forty pupils and teacher did some of the 

 best work we have heard of. But, unfortunately, 

 the long summer brought great destruction. Ar- 

 donia is still at it, undiscouraged. 



We finally could not decide between the work of 

 the Tracy School, in Lynn, Massachusetts, and the 

 Briggsville School, Clarksburg, Massachusetts. 

 The former is a city school, the latter a country one. 

 The work of each had such an effect upon the imme- 

 diate neighborhood, that no one could say which had 

 done the greater good. So they were both announced 

 winners, and were given The Garden Library. The 

 following reports from these two schools give a pretty 

 good idea of their work: 



Improving the Tracy Grammar 

 School Grounds 



IN 1906 this school yard consisted of 

 25,000 square feet of land, in the form 

 of a trapezoid, the parallel sides being 225 

 and 275 feet respectively. The width was 

 100 feet. There was no garden in the yard, 

 the condition of the grounds was that of the 

 ordinary city school yard. 



During the year 1906, the city authorities 

 gave to us an addition to the grounds of 

 about 15,000 square feet of land. On this 

 land were two old buildings, three trees 

 uncared for, and an ash dump. The build- 

 ings were torn down and removed, the trees 

 were trimmed and put into shape, the ash 

 dump removed, the land graded by the use of 

 200 cubic yards of gravel, 100 feet of granite 

 curbing was put in place along the street 

 borders of the grounds, a two-rail gas- 

 pipe fence set along the northern border 

 of the yard, a new fence along the eastern 

 border, and an old apple tree removed. 



The following is taken from one of the 

 pupil's own accounts of this same work: 



When the Tracy School was first opened, 

 very little was done to beautify the yard, 



£ rwir 





The problem of grading and banking as met by 

 the Briggsville School 



but after two or three years the pupils of the 

 ninth grade worked together and filled in and 

 planted a small portion of the back yard 

 with a few small shrubs and annuals. 

 Later, each child contributed a small sum 

 of money in order that we might buy a hedge 

 to place along the front of the yard facing 

 on Walnut Street. Not very much could 

 be accomplished, because of the limited 

 yard space. 



This last year the city of Lynn added about 

 seventeen thousand feet to our school yard. 



A wide garden running the whole length of 

 the yard is filled with shrubs and seeds, some 

 of which were given to the school by the 

 pupils. It is outlined with sods brought from 

 the neighboring fields by the boys of the ninth 

 grade. The school yard contains two very 

 old horse chestnut trees which were planted 

 in 1850 by a former resident of Ward Six. 



In the centre of the yard there is a large 

 bed of flowers laid out very prettily. 



At the front of the building there is a semi- 

 circular plot of grass in which a large bed 

 of geraniums is placed. 



Frank L. Whipple, Principal 



Working Under Difficulties 



THE work of the Briggsville School 

 was done under hard conditions. 

 The schoolhouse is placed upon a rise of 

 land, land difficult to deal with because of its 

 sandy nature, and because it formed a little 



watershed. The work as done by the 

 pupils has been described in a series of 

 papers, each taking up a phase of the 

 work, and written by different pupils. 

 The headings of these papers are most 

 suggestive, and since it is impossible on 

 account of space to print all of the papers, 

 the subjects given will help one to under- 

 stand a little of the difficulties met with 

 and conquered: I. The Pillars of the 

 Schoolhouse and the Coldframe; II. Our 

 School Garden; III. The Paths and Drive- 

 way; IV. The Lawn and Terrace; V. 

 The Drain-tile; VI. The Flagpole. One of 

 these accounts follows: 



OUR SCHOOL GARDEN 

 By Dorothea Dunlop and Clarence Miller 



When we first came to the school in the 

 fall of 1907, the school building was new 

 and the school grounds were just covered 

 with loose stones, lime, boards, chips, weeds 

 and about every kind of rubbish you can 

 think of. We wanted a neat yard. We 

 started by raking and picking up the 

 stones and rubbish, and making the yard 

 look as good as we could in the fall. 

 Soon the ground was frozen so we couldn't 

 do much. 



But through the winter and in the spring 

 we planned how we would fix the grounds. 

 We decided to have a path right down to 

 the road at the front and a terrace at the 

 right of it, with a small garden next the 

 building near the front porch and a long, 

 narrow garden at the side of the building. 

 We had the coldframe at the back of the 

 school so we made a path from the main 

 path to the coldframe around by the side 

 of the building. The land between the 

 paths formed a triangle. We had decided 

 to make it into a garden; so it was 

 ploughed up and all the stones picked 

 out. Then we got a man to bring us some 

 black loam for it, as the earth was just 

 yellow sand or clay. 



We gave a play to earn the money to get 

 the land ploughed and the earth carried. 



When we had a nice lawn we were anxious 

 to keep it, but the rain seemed determined 

 to run all over it and wash it into the gutter, 

 so we decided to teach it better. We sank 

 a drain-tile underneath the terrace from the 

 beginning of the driveway to the edge of 

 the road below. Now the school grounds 

 are nicely drained. 



These garden products were taken from the boys' own plots in the Fairview Garden. The work represented is entirely that of the chUdren shown 



