WHAT MAKES A SCHOOL GARDEN WORTH WHILE 17 
experiences that " the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and 
the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.” This fierce phrase 
contains the germ of mutual aid ; and mutual aid can by the 
right culture be nurtured into cooperation ; and cooperation 
is to-day the great life force of society. 
Now, admitting that all these dynamic currents are being 
set free in a school garden for the purposes of education, the 
question is. how they may be most effectively employed ; and 
this can hardly be profitably discussed until the use of the 
term ” school garden ” has been agreed upon. By some it has 
been interpreted thus : A school garden worth the name is not 
a teacher’s garden, or a philanthropist’s garden, but a garden 
worked out in thought and act by happy, purposeful children. 
” Purposeful,” in the mind of the educator, would naturally 
mean that the children, as well as doing the work, are carry- 
ing out plans of their own devising. Is this too much to ask 
in behalf of an education garden, if that is what it really is 
to be ? Hardly, if we are considering the garden from the 
viewpoint of the child ; but considering it, for a moment, 
from the angle of the teacher, the emphasis somehow changes. 
That there is a difference can easily be explained by the fact 
that to a teacher the garden plot, in and for itself, is often 
the matter of deepest concern. And, as it happens, more 
seems to depend upon the correctness of the early steps in 
conventional gardening than in any other study. Is a teacher 
so dull as not to foresee that, after the season is well under 
way, a mistake may be patched up, to be sure, but never 
really rectified ? Even before midsummer a garden has be- 
come a sort of exercise book where each blot and crooked 
letter stands magnified, — made so large, in fact, that literally 
he who runs may read. P'or from the first spade-thrust a 
garden lives in the public eye. The genial policeman, the 
bank president, the butcher’s boy, all pay a school garden the 
