Gardening for women

by Viscountess Frances Garnet Wolseley

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.

THE SCHOOL GARDENS OF CARLETON COUNTY, ONTARIO

The county of Carleton was selected by Prof. Robertson for the initiation of school gardens in Ontario, and the work that is being carried on here is typical of what is being done in the other four provinces. In all five gardens have been established under the Macdonald fund in Carleton County. Two of these are placed at Carp and Galetta, points on the Canada Atlantic Railway, distant twenty and thirty-three miles respectively from Ottawa. A third is located at Richmond, a small incorporated village in the heart of the county, distant from the capital about twenty miles by stage. The remaining gardens are situated at North Gower and Bowesville, the former about twenty-five miles and the latter five miles from the city. As the five schools at which these gardens have been established are from seven to fifteen miles apart, the experiment is being brought fairly under the scrutiny of the entire county. The garden at Richmond is within a short distance of the grounds of the County Agricultural Society, and will annually be open to the inspection of many hundred visitors to the fair. Already the gardens have attracted much local attention, and last autumn the products of the gardens won about a hundred dollars in prizes, given both by the agricultural societies and by private citizens who have taken a generous interest in this educational experiment.

After full discussion with trustees and ratepayers each garden was established under the direct approval and control of the school board concerned, and in harmony with the already existing regulations of the Education Department, which provide in a general way for instruction in agriculture and nature-study, and also for enlarging school grounds. It is worthy of note that while the ratepayers interested were not indifferent to the question of expense involved, they paid special attention to the fact that they were being asked to take up an experiment of a very novel nature which required a marked departure from the beaten path of elementary school work. Thus the educational aspects of school gardens were specially considered, the result being that the people have taken up the enterprise with an open-minded interest that has already carried the experiment far on the way to success.

The size of the gardens, including the usual school grounds, is in each case two acres, excepting the garden at Richmond, which contains three acres. Where additional land had to be acquired, the Macdonald fund bore half the cost, as also the whole cost of fencing and preparing the garden, erecting garden shed and providing the necessary tools, etc. The cost of maintenance of the garden is likewise met by the Macdonald fund for a period of three years. For the same period Sir William Macdonald pays the salary of the travelling instructor, Mr. J. W. Gibson, who visits each garden one day per week to assist the teachers in directing the garden work of the pupils, to give lessons in certain practical aspects of nature-study, and generally to encourage the association of the garden work with the ordinary exercises of the classrooms.

One of the most useful accessories to the school garden is the garden shed, which is used for storing tools and produce, and for carrying on work not suited to the classroom, such as preparing tickets and labels, analysing soils, assorting seeds, arranging plants, etc. The average cost of the garden sheds is about seventy-five dollars. They are of various shapes and sizes, according to the number of pupils to be accommodated. A popular plan is that of a shed, ten feet by twenty feet, with an extension on one side about five feet wide, and finished as a greenhouse. This obviates the necessity of having special hot-beds. The garden tools are disposed along the walls of the shed in places numbered to accord with the numbering of the pupils’ plots. Along one side of each shed is a bench or table of plain boards, about eighteen inches wide, running close to the wall, along which are several small windows giving abundant light to pupils engaged in practical work.