Oh, These Women !----" Horticulture In The Public Schools" - Tin-Can Flower Pots - Botanic Vs. Common Names Of Plants - Mrs. Tarryer Calls On The Wisdom Of The Granges - Washington Legislators Brought To Grass.

DELIGHTFUL it is to find our old friend Thomas Meehan dropping suggestive paragraphs into The American Garden, and curious to observe that in both instances, in the January number, he has run across Mrs. Tarry-er's hawser, or, rather, that good lady's street-yarn.

Oh, these women! It is no wonder Rev. Joel Howe's biographer lets him stamp his cane down hard, and say : "I wish there wasn't a woman in the world!" No sooner than we get our little systems fixed to our minds, than some woman will whisk her skirts around and knock them over - or else she will bring up a boy to do it.

For my part I was believing what Mr. Meehan said under "Horticulture in the Public Schools," about the impossibility of growing geraniums in a tight heir-loom of a wooden flower-pot, with a savings-bank of paper money in the secret bottom. But no sooner had I read the piece to Mrs. Tarryer than she stepped into the other room, returning with her arms full of the most beautiful young geraniums in bloom, all from slips, and every one of them was growing luxuriantly in tin cans, tight as a bottle, and covered nicely with maroon colored paper!

"There are lots of coal-clinkers for drainage in the bottoms," she said. "It is a good way to raise plants from slips. The earth below and at the sides never gets dry. But we must be careful and not water too much. The principle involved is not greatly different in effect from that of the hard-pan in some parts of our garden, is it ? A false bottom to these cans could be stuffed with bank bills and take no harm, you see".

Mr. Meehan will pull himself together, no doubt, as I did, for this view only shows, as he said, that plant life should be a study of the first importance in all schools, and indicates an abundant source of outfitting material of all sizes for potting. Nothing can be handier than those papered tin cans. The vigor of foliage and wealth of blossoms soon covers the handsome pots out of sight. They stand on shelves, tables and windows much closer than flaring vessels, and are cleaner to handle.

The other point - referring to what Mr. Meehan says on page 56 about common and botanic names - he half yields to Mrs. Tarryer already, because it is right in line with his life-long thinking and writing, and because she is a pronoun of multitude, covering an immense number of women, who will have an advance in popular education.

There must be something like uniformity in the common speech of the people regarding the plants that are of use to them, or else civilization comes to a stand. This is the more needful since railways are fetching everybody together and making all sorts of grotesque provincialisms seem more absurd by scattering them. Mrs. "Pomona" Tarryer had the "parrot's own "time among the granges while she was proving that farmers know a great deal about grasses if they only had the genuine names to convey the knowledge.

One time in a grange she arranged with her sister Graces (Ceres and Flora), to see how much the men-folks really did know about their own business. There was company present; one or two retired clergymen, first-rate gardeners; quite a gathering of deacons, elders and select men from out of town, besides a strong local muster of our most careful and influential farmers - old diggers, all, and men of bank accounts - the fathers of rural and urban society, with their wives and daughters.

Mrs. Tarryer took these stalwart husbandmen on a question of the number of grasses each had seen and could describe - from memory, mind you - in his meadows, pastures, gardens, fields, swamps and road-sides. She begged them not to mention names at all, but to confine themselves to telling how each grass looked - how and where it grew, and so forth.

This put all hands on their intellectual muscle, so to speak. The characteristics of some twenty or twenty-five grasses were spread before us with such photographic particularity that every old weeder and hay-maker in the grange knew them at once. Any naturalist would have envied the crisp and concise language of these descriptions. They detailed the appearance and habits of the plants referred to throughout the entire season, proving familiarity with their life-history. But the names given were a caution to public educators !

The advice not to mention names, produced, on the contrary, a wonderful flux in that respect, for a while, from all parts of the grange-room. Perhaps Mrs. Tarryer meant to, though more likely she Couldn't help it. But when a number of these venerable fathers had fully aired their vocabularies in the most gracious manner, giving out the few names that had been handed down in their respective families with a certain degree of unction, the effect was seen to be somewhat ludicrous by the young people present who were watching closely and there was a halting and a looking to and fro among the stalwart speakers !

By referring to the minutes of the secretary - a vigilant sister - it was found that seven different blue - six twitch - " or a kind of a twitch" - and five June grasses had been noted and accurately described. This was too much ! If our farming people were not the most conservative and orderly in the world there would have been a great row in that meeting ! As it was, everything ended pleasantly.

The fact is, "crops" and "weeds" are the two general classifications most used in agriculture. These may rarely come to speech and only be in mind. If boys or girls ask what such or such a plant is and it is named by an elder, the name may soon forgotten and the plant as well, unless it be persistently useful or troublesome. But an exact knowledge, though perhaps unspoken - of the plants it has to deal with, is fixed in rural life, otherwise it could not exist. The plain duty of science is to get on its farm and garden boots and blow the chaff of scholastic ages out of its own names of needful plants so the people can use them. We have very few grass names common in this country. It is a waste of time to rake together, revive and print the obsolete nick-names which never had and never can have general circulation. They are of no use, except by their dead weight to sink the whole in oblivion.