Research & reports

Nina Leubrie · The Elementary School Teacher · United States

In October, upon the school's opening, many flowers were still blooming in "Grandmother's Garden" at Lincoln Park. The children desired to plant hollyhocks, hardy chrysanthemums, and bright autumn flowers in front of their building, but it was determined to be too late for fall flowers. Consequently, it was decided that spring flowers would be planted using bulbs, for which catalogues were obtained, and pictures and descriptions were studied.

Flora J. Cooke, Elsie A. Wygant, Lorley Ada Ashléman · The Elementary School Teacher and Course of Study · United States

A 1902 account of a pedagogical activity in which children in the School of Education planted part of a garden for children attending the summer model school, who would then pickle, can or otherwise preserve the crops and maintain a window box of blooming plants left for the returning students. The article describes how the activity integrated manual training (building boxes and trellises), science (germination experiments, soil observation), number work (estimating costs, measuring), reading, and expression (recording growth through painting, writing and modeling) into an instructional plan.

· Wikipédia (français) · France

This French Wikipedia article traces the history of French family/allotment gardens (jardins familiaux). The movement began in 1896 when abbé Lemire founded the "Ligue française du Coin de Terre et du Foyer," reorganized in 1921 into the "Fédération nationale des jardins familiaux," with the term "jardins familiaux" legally defined by a law of 26 July 1952. Gardens in the Paris region grew from 48 in 1904 to 1,515 in 1913, and by around 1945, at the end of World War II, France had roughly 250,000 such gardens.