The Child and His Garden

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Apr 27, 1916

The Child and His Garden

Do not deplore your lack of special training and equipment for training your little ones if you have a tiny spot of earth that they can dig and water and tend. The earth has no terrors for small fingers, as every mother knows. They love to play with it, and in it, and to feel it, soft and warm, beneath their bare feet in the spring. We shall do well to foster this inborn love of nature, direct it into right channels, and help the children to learn, for themselves, a few of the lessons so attractively set forth, with living, breathing, moving illustrations, in the beautiful, wide-open book of nature.

“Show the child a deserted orchard, where lack of trimming has made the trees degenerate into a wild state,” says Carolyn Sherwin Bailey, in American Motherhood. “Weeds choke the roots; the trees bloom in pink splendor, but the apples are gnarled and small. Dead branches keep the live ones from doing their work. Here, again, nature shows how she punishes neglect with death. A garden overgrown with weeds has the same lesson to teach a child, as an uncultivated field.”

“There is a great deal of moral training for little children in laying out a garden, keeping it free of insect pests, and digging out the weeds. If the small gardener is careless in planting his garden paths, if he plants in uneven rows, and sets out shoots and clippings crookedly, every day that the garden grows he will have a more and more vivid reminder of his carelessness. He reaps exactly as he sows; the crooked rows of peas grow more and more crooked; the bent cutting grows into a bent tree. The potato bug that is allowed to remain in the garden breeds until it is almost impossible to eradicate his family. One weed left unpulled, spreads to a hundred.”

“A garden is a very honest place; it teaches a child, every day, the unbreakable law of cause and effect. If the child was careless about sorting his seed before he planted, and bad seeds are dropped in the ground, he loses just so much in his harvest. And this garden honesty is shown conversely as well. No force in life rewards honest dealing so lavishly as does nature; the good seed multiplies into a thousand; last year’s vine, carefully pruned, bears a greater harvest of grapes than it ever did before; and all along the line of exact gardening the plant that is given a chance of free growth is apt to double its buds and fruit. . . .

“A garden is not only an honest place, but a generous place as well. The child should tend his garden for others. He should realize that he is working in order to have something to give to others as a result of his labor. To give a bunch of fresh flowers to some one who is ill or who loves them, or to fill a vase every day for mother; to pack a dainty basket with crisp lettuce and radishes every morning for some one who needs them; or to supply the home table with vegetables, berries, and fruits, is to make a child unselfish and generous.”