| Educational gardening for children became popular around the start of the twentieth century, offering active learning, nature study instruction, and character-building experiences. Early gardening proponents hoped children would grow intellectually, physically, and spiritually in their gardens, as they learned science, poetry, perseverance, and good morals. Over the course of the century, the key lessons of the child's garden changed as did its typical form. Rectangular plots of orderly rows gave way to potted avocado trees and bean teepees. Gardens evolved in size, content, and purpose as material affluence and a societal quest for leisure came to dominate a work ethic, and as the scientific outlook of educators made the child's garden less a place of wonder than of control. The perspective and goals of gardening instructors mattered. Public schools, parents, city recreation departments, civic groups, children's organizations, popular magazines, and authors of children's books were among the twentieth-century leaders of children's gardening.; Progressive gardens provided children contact with nature while teaching them to value their own productive efforts and the beauty of God's creation. A few million children gardened earnestly in 1919 as soldiers in the United States School Garden Army. Only ten years later, however, middle-class suburban children were rather more likely to cultivate flowers than vegetables on their quest for a more beautiful America. In the decades after World War II, the gardening experiences of many children became limited to bean seed germination, a classroom lesson in elementary science. When efforts at environmental education began around 1970, children's gardening, despite great popularity earlier, was largely absent from programs intended to teach children to care for the earth.; A history of children and gardens explains why Earth Day efforts largely ignored gardening, and why, at the close of the century, children's gardens ranged from the trivial to the idealistic. Some aimed to provide fun and easy activities, others to create a better world. The story of children's gardens is one of harvests, tangible and intangible, and of changing ideas about the education of children and the human place in the natural world. |
