worked by a first year boy or girl. Thus the financial end of gar- 
dening is only another step in progress. 
The flower borders, still kept even in war times because we 
love them, and because they are used for hospitals, homes, and 
mother’s and father’s birthday bouquets, represent co-operative 
work. Many of the plants are started in the greenhouse and 
planted out so that the first bloom comes in late June or early 
July, and, by careful setting of annuals in and about these green- 
house seedlings, continuous bloom is obtained all through the 
season. This is a problem which opens up all sorts of interesting 
sides never to be entirely solved and worked out, always varying, 
always offering opportunity for thought, book work and green- 
house practice. Nothing tends more to the holding of boys and 
girls to a task than this idea of progressive educational work. 
There is another essential aid to permanent interest, and that 
is the financial side of the garden. This is a far more difficult 
problem in the regular school garden, but it seems only ethical 
that a boy or girl should pay for his piece of land a price which in 
some measure covers at least the cost of seed. There is a great 
incentive to raise a splendid crop if you have invested a sum of 
money in this experiment. “Can you make one hundred or two 
hundred per cent on your garden investment ?’’ is a question we 
often put up to our boys and girls. Given a garden 8 by 10 feet, the 
price for which is twenty-five cents, what can you make? Given a 
garden 10 by 20 feet for fifty cents, what can you makeon this invest- 
ment ? There is very little danger of a boy losing interest in 
what he has put cash into. We suppose if a child paid for his 
arithmetic lessons there would be a quickening interest in arith- 
metic. This was clearly demonstrated in former days, when the 
farmer's son, having no free high school to attend, had to work out 
his tuition in the village school. 
This last season we have had in our garden a small group of 
Italian boys from a certain club. The club paid the fees for the 
boys, against the advice of the Botanic Garden. All these boys 
dropped out of their work, saying, when they were told that they 
were losing the money that had been put into the garden, they 
did not care because it was not their money. In a garden of 387 
boys and girls, those nine were the only ones who dropped out 
from lack of interest; therefore, the lack of Interest could not be 
laid to the teaching. In our opinion, it went back entirely to the 
fact that these boys did not have to raise their own money— they 
had made no investment. 
Connected with this garden is a summer school for adults. 
The garden is supposed to be a practical school for those who 
wish to take up, as a profession, children’s garden work. The 
summer school has failed to have the practice that it might have 
had could we have accomplished our first vision for this garden, 
but perhaps the students have received more in other ways. The 
members of this summer school have their lessons as the children 
have them: they plant their own gardens, care for them, make a 
study of those things in nature which apply to and touch the 
garden, such as shade trees, wild flowers, the weeds that bother 
us, the insects that prey upon our crops, the tools we use, the 
baskets we carry as containers— all those things which are cor- 
related phases of this work. We give some time, during this 
summer school, to the discussion of high school botany as it 
might be worked out through the school garden. The future of 
botany, at least in our secondary schools, is dependent upon 
those practical applications which teachers are able tomake, just 
as garden work and nature study in the elementary school lives 
when it becomes vital and affects the individual. 
Ellen Eddy Shaw. 
