p. 12 | Gardening for the Children by Anna Cliff White

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Apr 21, 1904

Gardening for the Children

By Anna Cliff White

ANNA CLIFF WHITE

Every home should have a garden, and every child in the home should have his share in that garden. Turn into the lap of mother earth the quiet, studious child, who, to the detriment of his health, loves his books better than exercise. Interest him in the great book of nature; give him simple lessons in botany, and awaken his mind to the wonderful lessons of life that may be gleaned from seeds and plants. Dress him in plain, easy-fitting garments, and let him delve in the wholesome dirt, and inhale the pure air and glorious sunshine, and your sickly student will develop a strong physique, with mind and thought brighter and broader for the body culture he has received in his mother’s garden. Your boisterous, romping, shouting child will develop qualities of gentleness, loving-kindness, thoughtfulness, and intelligence as he cares for his little corner of treasures, and meets each day some new phase of life which absorbs his growing thoughts. Teach the children to take an interest in natural things, fill their small minds with the beautiful and wonderful things of God’s creation, and there will be no room for the world’s evil to creep in later.

Henry Ward Beecher advised:

“Always encourage your child to pursue gardening. A boy that can bury a chipmunk after he is dead, can plant a gladiolus; after it is once planted, there is nothing to be done but to keep the bed weeded; as soon as the plants blossom,they are so gorgeous that the boy is sure to be very proud of them. You can get them for a small sum apiece, and so can furnish, for a few shillings, a bed of gladioli that will blossom more than two months, and be pre-eminently gorgeous. Then give him a little instruction, and let him try something else: a row of poppies, perhaps; they sow themselves. Get the French poppy, which is single, but runs through the most exquisite range of color,—all combinations that you can imagine,—also the perennial poppy, which soon becomes an established root; in their time the poppies are so gorgeous that every one who comes near them has to put on smoked glasses, as it were. They fill a child’s eye. They are for him a magnificent success. Every one admires them; and this admiration excites his ambition. The boy, who goes through that one summer, and finds every one spontaneously praising what he has done, generally has the horticultural fever; and when he has once caught it, he never recovers!”