Gardening for Little Girls by Olive Hyde Foster, author of “Cookery for Little Girls” “Sewing for Little Girls” “Housekeeping for Little Girls”
CONTENTS
Chapter 1. First Steps Toward a Garden
Chapter 2. Planning and Planting the Flower Beds
Chapter 3. Flowers that Must be Renewed Every Year--(Annuals)
Chapter 4. Flowers that Live Through Two Years
Chapter 5. Flowers that come up Every Year by Themselves (Perennials)
Chapter 6. Flowers that Spring from a Storehouse (Bulbs and Tubers)
Chapter 7. That Queen--The Rose
Chapter 8. Vines, Tender and Hardy
Chapter 9. Shrubs We Love to See
Chapter 10. Vegetable Growing for the Home Table
Chapter 11. Your Garden’s Friends and Foes
Chapter 12. A Morning Glory Playhouse
Chapter 13. The Work of a Children’s Garden Club
Chapter 14. The Care of House Plants
Chapter 15. Gifts that will Please a Flower Lover
Chapter 16. The Gentlewoman’s Art--Arranging Flowers
Preface
Children take naturally to gardening, and few occupations count so much for their development,--mental, moral and physical.
Where children’s garden clubs and community gardens have been tried, the little folks have shown an aptitude surprising to their elders, and under exactly the same natural, climatic conditions, the children have often obtained astonishingly greater results. Moreover, in the poor districts many a family table, previously unattractive and lacking in nourishment, has been made attractive as well as nutritious, with their fresh green vegetables and flowers.
Ideas of industry and thrift, too, are at the same time inculcated without words, and habits formed that affect their character for life. A well-known New York City Public School superintendent once said to me that she had a flower bed every year in the children’s gardens, where a troublesome boy could always be controlled by giving to him the honor of its care and keeping.
The love of nature, whether inborn or acquired, is one of the greatest sources of pleasure, and any scientific knowledge connected with it of inestimable satisfaction. Carlyle’s lament was, “Would that some one had taught me in childhood the names of the stars and the grasses.”
It is with the hope of helping both mothers and children that this little book has been most lovingly prepared.
Note
As the desire is to give the widest possible range of information about the plants and flowers mentioned herein, and space forbids going into details in each case, the writer has endeavored to mention all the colors, extremes of height, and entire season of bloom of each kind. But the grower must find out the particular variety obtained, and NOT expect a shrubby clematis to climb, or a fall rose to blossom in the spring!
