Children's Gardens for Pleasure, Health and Education, Henry G. Parsons, New York, 1912

As America developed into an increasingly industrialized nation with its attendant manmade benefits and problems, 19th century Americans began to show signs of an appreciation of the natural world, a sentiment heavily tinged with nostalgia for a simpler time. Beginning in 1890, when the Massachusetts Horticultural Society sent one of their members to Europe to study school gardens, American urban schools inaugurated gardens to bring nature to children, along with progressive educational values such as cooperation, outdoor exercise and modern science. And in a country that equated virtue and success with hard work, a garden was seen as an important moral training ground.