Some Planting Experiences With Children. 
Elm Place School. 
Our school is in a little suburban city where real estate is 
expensive and satisfactory space for gardens and garden 
experiments at a premium. Real farms are so far away that 
the pupils that study the work of the farmer have to visit him by 
motor-bus. This our third grade groups have been doing regular- 
ly for many years, one trip being made in the spring to watch 
the planting in the field and another trip in the fall to see what 
the farmer has produced and how he is preparing for winter. 
The school itself is a sort of tenant at its own risk of a corner lot 
a block away which is perennially for sale by the real 
estate agent. Besides this it maintains a "nursery" on an 
unoccupied school site about a half mile distant. This nursery 
has been the scene of some triumphs and many failures, the 
latter due to some extent to the unpromising condition of the 
soil as to texture and drainage, a contributing cause being the 
carefree manner of life and inquiring disposition of the 
neighbor's chickens. It is of this nursery that we might speak 
first. 
The nursery was begun with the ambitious program of 
making it a continuous source of supply for the homes and city 
parkways of such native trees as the hard and red Maples, the 
Elm, Linden, Red Cedar, "White Pine, Hawthorns, "Wild-crabs, 
etc., and of the shrubs such as the Red-Osier Dogwood, Downy 
Viburnum, Maple-leaved Viburnum, high-bush Cranberry, 
Witch-hazel, etc. It was planned also to propagate .garden 
fruits, Currants and Gooseberries, for example. The program 
was too ambitious and fell down of its own weight but the results 
though rather meager have been of such a nature as to influence 
us to project the whole thing anew as soon as better facilities 
can be secured. It was intended to begin in each instance with 
seed or cutting — but we have had our troubles. Our Red Maple 
seeds gathered at maturity and planted at once have during 
three seasons failed to germinate under the lath shelters. Elm 
seeds have germinated but the seedlings have lost their vitality 
in storage. Willow and Red-Osier Dogwood cuttings, on the 
other hand, have produced vigorous shrubs for resetting, and 
cuttings of the cultivated Currant have become stout bushes. 
We have had good results in setting out in the nursery self- 
planted seedlings of Elm found along the border of the school 
grounds and hard Maple seedlings lifted from the neighboring 
woods. Our most showy results have been from seedlings bought 
at wholesale and permitted to grow in the nursery for three or 
four years. Last season we gave away to the city park commis- 
sion fifteen Red Cedars that represented an original planting of 
fifty seedlings ; but our plants were four feet high when we gave 
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