INTRODUCTION 
1 1 
The social life of a whole family may easily center around 
the garden. A young girl living in one of the few remaining 
dwelling houses now standing in the business section of a 
city tells a charming story of their home garden. It slipped 
out quite casually one day in the botany class, through an 
endeavor to persuade her classmates to plant flowers on 
their roofs. To show how well this would work, she drew a 
little picture of their own family life. 
There were nine children. The father had always gone 
daft over his flower garden, and the children were worthy 
scions ; but bit by bit the land around them was sliced away 
and nearly all the sun was shut out by high buildings. At 
last they agreed to transfer their garden to the shed roof. So 
the neighborhood was scoured for boxes six feet or more 
in length. Then took place the exciting ceremony of hoisting 
these boxes up onto the roof. The best arrangement for them 
had already been discussed. In readiness for planting they 
had contrived to raise seedlings and slips by putting them 
under the skylight — the only place where the sun could 
stream in. These boxes of plantlets the children would run 
upstairs several times a day to adjust so that the rays should 
always strike just right. It was plain to see that, besides the 
joy of the work itself, this garden, like many another, gave 
opportunity for the interplay between young minds and old, 
and on more or less equal terms. Such opportunities, if we 
stop to think, occur too seldom, particularly in these days 
when interests, and especially pleasures, are so largely strati- 
fied according to age. It is self-evident that the girl in this 
particular botany class, who owned a garden, would have a 
much more solid foundation for knowledge than the rest, 
who had learned their facts from mere detached schoolroom 
specimens^ no matter how carefully these might have been 
selected for them by a teacher. 
