Gardening for women

by Viscountess Frances Garnet Wolseley

THE MACDONALD SCHOOL GARDENS

The following information relative to the School Garden movement is taken from a paper written by Mr. R. H. Cowley, and originally published in the Queen’s Quarterly.

In the spring of 1904 a group of school gardens went into operation in each of the provinces of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. These school gardens are associated with Sir William C. Macdonald’s plans for the improvement of Canadian schools, and they constitute a notable feature of the general scheme devised by Professor James W. Robertson, director of the Macdonald educational movement.

At a meeting of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, in 1890, a paper on horticultural education for children was read by Mr. Henry Lincoln Clapp, master of George Putnam School, Roxbury, Mass. At this school a garden was established the following year as a result of the interest awakened. This garden, which appears to have been the first of its kind in the United States, was devoted exclusively to native wild plants until 1901, when a vegetable plot was added. Here and there within the past decade, and with various objects in view, the idea has been employed by private citizens, charitable associations, commercial firms, horticultural societies, and a few educational institutions, but as yet the school garden has not become an organic feature of any state system of education.

In Canada the school garden idea has also received some recognition prior to the Macdonald movement. For several years a very successful and quite extensive garden for boys has been conducted at Broadview, Toronto, by Captain Atkinson, of the Boys’ Brigade Institute. Here and there throughout the Dominion, floriculture has been encouraged to some extent in the elementary schools. Under the aggressive advocacy of Dr. A. H. MacKay, Superintendent of Education, whose faith in all branches of nature-study has been fully justified by his works, Nova Scotia has taken a leading place in establishing school gardens. In 1903 there were 52 school gardens in the province. Last July 79 in all were reported. The special courses in agriculture and nature-study, recently provided for teachers, has had a considerable influence in promoting the school garden movement, though outside the Macdonald gardens few are yet more than temporary efforts of the teacher for the time being.

It is apparent that three leading motives underlie the origin and growth of school gardens in Europe:—(1) to provide a convenient means of supplementing the teachers’ income, thereby simplifying the problem of maintaining the public school; (2) to promote a practical knowledge of horticulture and agriculture, thereby increasing the national prosperity; (3) to furnish means and material for the practical study of botany as a desirable department of scientific knowledge.

The vast majority of European school gardens look to utility. Of the few that recognise the importance of the educational end, nearly all stop short at the acquisition of a certain amount of scientific information and the habit of careful observation. On the other hand, the Macdonald School Gardens, while designed to encourage the cultivation of the soil as an ideal life-work, are intended to promote above all things else symmetrical education of the individual. They do not aim at education to the exclusion of utility, but they seek education through utility, and utility through education. The garden is the means, the pupil is the end. The Macdonald School Gardens are a factor in an educational movement, and for this reason Professor Robertson sought to have them brought under the Education Department, and not under the Department of Agriculture, in each province. The fact that the various provinces already referred to have passed orders in council incorporating the Macdonald School Gardens into their educational systems at once places these school gardens on a broader educational basis than that occupied by the school gardens of any other state or country.

The Ontario Government has provided special courses at Guelph to train teachers in the practical educational aspects of this new work. An initial grant of one hundred dollars, as well as an annual grant, is offered to any rural school section establishing a school garden. At Truro, and elsewhere in the Maritime Provinces, suitable courses for teachers are also provided. In New Brunswick, annual grants of thirty dollars to the Board of Trustees are given where a garden is established at an elementary school. In Quebec, extensive preparations for the training of teachers in the new lines of education are under way.

The Macdonald School Gardens not only have a recognised place in the provincial systems of education, but they are attached to the ordinary rural schools, owned by the school corporation and conducted under the authority of the school trustees and the express approval of the ratepayers.

The work of the garden is recognised as a legitimate part of the school programme, and it is already interwoven with a considerable part of the other studies. The garden is becoming the outer classroom of the school, and the plots are its blackboards. The garden is not an innovation, or an excrescence, or an addendum, or a diversion. It is a happy field of expression, an organic part of the school in which the boys and girls work among growing things and grow themselves in body and mind and spiritual outlook.

The true relation of the garden to the school has been in good part established by the travelling instructors whom Professor Robertson appointed to supervise the work in each province. These instructors were chosen as teachers of experience in rural schools, and were sent for special preparation, at the expense of the Macdonald fund, to Chicago, Cornell, Columbia, and Clark universities, and to the Ontario Agricultural College, Guelph.