everyday sort of limited gardening, if one has the eyes to see, 
there are features which set this garden a little apart from the 
ordinary war garden. 
Peihaps the feature that is best worth noting, and least likely 
to be noted, is that the garden is planned on the educational 
principle of progression. To illustrate this concretely, let us 
suppose that a high school boy, a child of twelve, and another of 
eight, enter this garden at the same time. None of them has 
ever had any definite instructions in gardening before, so, 
regardless of age, they are all started at one and the same place; 
that is, they are given small plots of land 8 by 10 feet. They are 
all given the same initial lessons. These lessons take up the 
preparation of gardens for planting, the measuring off of drills 
for seed, methods of planting different kinds of seeds so that the 
resultant crops will be typical of different methods of treatment. 
There are certain underlying principles of gardening and of 
planting and of crop handling which are essential to have at the 
outset, just as it is essential for a child to be grounded in the 
first elements of his regular school subjects. One usually starts 
a child in kindergarten or the first grade, rather than start him in 
the sixth or seventh grade of school. This is for obvious reasons. 
In the same way our garden lessons should be planned with the 
same ideas and principles in sight. 
Even though we are all working at the present time on what 
we term war gardens, at the same time we should be doing war 
work which will last. People should not forget that gardening 
for children is not primarily a matter of economic value; that is, 
of dollars and cents, but is a matter of pedagogy, physiology, 
and child study. An illustration of the truth of this came to me 
forcibly through a little story told of a farmer who had some high 
school boys working for him and was unable to get any work out 
of them. If the farmer had been less a farmer, and more a stu- 
dent of human nature, he could have turned the coltish pranks 
of the boys into serious and productive labor. Obviously if gar- 
dening is not one of those educational subjects from which and 
through which we are to make better citizens, then school gardens 
are a waste of time except during the period of war, and those 
of us who have worked a good share of our lives in this field 
know that gardening is of lasting value to children only when the 
lessons extend beyond the dollar sign. 
But since the viewpoint of the dollar is, unfortunately, of 
greater carrying weight than the viewpoint of development in 
citizenship, the argument of the dollar is often the only one con- 
sidered. Good crops are always the natural results of good 
lessons taught in gardening, and it is unfortunate, even as a war 
measure, to try to obtain results founded on poor methods. 
So it was that we started our war gardens, twisting the 
economic value around the educational core that is intended to be 
the basis of our work at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. 
To go back to the example of our high school boy, the child, 
and the youngster of eight. After the first lessons have been 
digested and put into practice, after the work of transplanting, 
thinning and cultivating have been rubbed into these beginners, 
they naturally go at different rates of speed. As fast as the les- 
sons are mastered, they go on to different phases of vegetable 
culture. It usually happens that the first year these three, while 
going at a little different rate of progress, will, after all, stay 
about together, doing the same work with differing degrees of 
excellence; but after this first season the high school or older 
boy or girl is ready to go onto a larger area of land, trying out 
the same lessons, either using much the same crops, or else 
specializing on some crop which is far more difficult to raise. 
