The Nature Study Movement at Cornell University; A Journey South to Study Spiders

This chapter details Anna Botsford Comstock's early days in the nature study education movement. She joined several key figures—Alice McCloskey, Julia Rogers, and Mary Rogers Miller—who were already involved in nature education initiatives at Cornell University with Liberty Hyde Bailey. During the years 1891 to 1893 there was general agricultural depression in the East, and New York City found itself called upon, for the first time in history, to help people who flocked in from the rural districts in search of work. Mr. George T. Powell, who was director of Farmers' Institutes, was called in as an expert in a conference to consider the situation. He maintained that poor farming was one of the reasons for agricultural depression, and that the only permanent remedy would be to interest the children of the rural districts in farming. He also declared that nature study was the means to use to interest the child in the farm.

Lesson I.—The Pumpkin

This is an inquiry-based educational text for elementary students on the pumpkin and its comparison to the squash, explored through lyrical poetry by John Greenleaf Whittier and prose by Liberty Hyde Bailey.

The Liberty Hyde Bailey Gardener's Companion

The Liberty Hyde Bailey Gardener's Companion: Essential Writings collects the best and most accessible literary garden writings of Liberty Hyde Bailey, the Father of Modern Horticulture and founder of the New Agrarianism. Despite Bailey's huge influence as a journalistic popularizer of amateur gardening from the late nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth, and despite the rise in recent years of widespread interest in gardening, such an anthology has never been compiled until now. The essays and poems that make up the collection include work from Bailey's most beautiful literary and philosophical books about plants and people, as well as essays from periodicals that have never been published in book form, and even an essay that Bailey read over nationalized radio in 1930 and has never before appeared in print. The result of about a decade of research and collecting on the part of the editors, The Liberty Hyde Bailey Gardener's Companion will provide the best introduction available to those unfamiliar with Bailey's writing, and for the seasoned Bailey enthusiast it will offer a trove of delightful and unexpected marvels.

Introduction

This book’s seed was planted in 2006 in South Haven, Michigan, at the Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum, at one of its first weekly series of programs, which we called Brown Bag Botany. These were free summer lunch presentations, given on warm, halcyon days behind the white clapboard homestead of Bailey’s parents, just about a mile from Lake Michigan. They took place underneath a grand, mature black walnut tree planted when the surrounding land was still the old Bailey farm. Never lacking for content, Bailey’s instructional books in the museum library were an easy means to create easy programs. This was my introduction, as the museum’s first director, to his writings, which, despite being removed nearly a century from our own time, were readable, engaging, and, frankly, a hit. His voice spoke. Local folks, sitting around picnic tables under the old tree, would nod along to passages, laugh at moments of Bailey’s sparkling wit, and sometimes be moved to applause. Museum newsletters featuring his work would lead to museum blog posts, which in turn would lead to small in-house reprints of out-of-print material. So began a natural process to bring together for the first time an anthology of Liberty Hyde Bailey’s most inspirational garden writings, which evolved into a labor of love to track down as many such pieces in Bailey’s massive oeuvre as possible....