WILD FLOWERS FOR CITY CHILDREN
Children who live in the country part or all of the year do not know how much pleasure they might give if they would gather wild flowers and send them to city children. There is a society which distributes flowers thus collected in New York but maybe there is none in the city near you. The commonest flowers, even the weeds like daisies and dandelions and black-eyed Susans, are eagerly taken home by children who are so poor that they never even saw a park, much less a meadow. In one city school over two hundred children had never seen a dandelion. A lady once started with a bunch of daisies to give to a city friend. She was met at the ferry with, "Please give me a flower." She went on up the street. "Won't chu gimme one o'yer flowers?" Children seemed to appear from every direction; maybe they were always there and she had not noticed them before. The grown-up friend did not get any flowers but she got a good story instead. Mr. Jacob Riis founded a flower mission on a similar experience. It is fun to gather flowers anyhow, and if you can make some other child happy even for a few minutes it would be even more fun. This is only a hint.
SHELF FUNGI
Have you seen those outgrowths on dying and dead trees which stand out like a shelf? They are called bracket or shelf fungi. If you have an artist friend who can make beautiful things on these by carving them with little engraving tools, gather all you see for her.
Photograph by Verne Morton
Gathering Wild Flowers for City Children
DANDELION GREENS
Do your folks cook dandelion greens? Mine never did but since seeing them for sale at so much per half-peck I have come to think that they must be eatable and have wished we had gathered and sold the bushels that grew in our lawn.