Louise Klein Miller Biography

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Louise Klein Miller was an educator, naturalist, and lifelong proponent of the inclusion of nature study and gardening in children’s education. Born on a farm near Dayton, Ohio, in 1854, Miller attended Cook County’s Normal School in Illinois in 1893 (now Chicago State University) where she came under the influence of nature study proponents Colonel Francis Parker and Wilbur S. Jackman. After graduation, Miller authored Course in Nature Study for Detroit Schools (1896) and taught and supervised nature studies curricula for schools in Michigan and New York. She furthered her education by studying plant evolution with botanist John Merle Coulter at Chicago University and  was among the first women to attend the Cornell University State College of Forestry, where she studied forestry, geology, entomology, chemistry, and other subjects under  horticulturist Liberty Hyde Bailey. To Miller, nature study not only represented a scientific education but a metaphysical one, with the aim of teaching pupils that “they are but higher expressions of the same energy which produced a drop of dew or a world.”

The early twentieth century saw the School Garden Movement emerge as a successor to nature study. By 1901, Miller moved to Groton, Massachusetts, to serve as the first known faculty member of the Lowthorpe School of Horticulture and Landscape Gardening for Women. With her student Elizabeth Seward Hill, Miller planned and directed the Lowthorpe Garden, built by and for young schoolboys from a Groton elementary school. Miller used the work required to design, lay out, plant, and tend to a garden to educate the boys in a variety of fields, stating, “The object is not to make gardens, but to make men.” Under Hill’s direction, Groton’s school gardens would expand to include girls’ gardens and horticultural shows.

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In 1904 Miller moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where she served as the head of the newly established Department of School Gardens for the Cleveland Board of Education for three decades. The program included small summer gardens for elementary students at elementary schools and students’ home gardens. Miller supervised the gardens, gave lectures on gardening in schools, encouraged students to plant gardens at their homes, and organized seasonal flower shows. During this time, in conjunction with the United States Department of Agriculture, Miller published Children’s Gardens for School and Home: A Manual for Cooperative Gardening (1904). In her book, Miller discusses the origins of school gardens in Europe and their current standing in America before providing detailed instructions for their planting and care. She also authored various articles on school gardens for Home and Flowers: An Illustrated Monthly Magazine Devoted to the Home Beautiful. The only known school garden still in existence planned and directed by Miller is the Memorial Garden, built in 1910 to honor the 172 students and teachers who died in the 1908 fire at the Lake View School in Collinwood, Ohio. Although now neglected, the Memorial Garden was once planted with flowers grown by students in a greenhouse under Miller’s direction.

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After retiring from her position with the Cleveland Board of Education, Miller oversaw campus ground maintenance and improvements at the Blossom Hill School for Girls in Brecksville, Ohio. Miller served in numerous organizations, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the School Gardening Association of America, American Geography Society, School Gardening Association of America, Astronomical Society, Woman’s Aeronautical Association, American Pen Women, American Forestry Association, Iowa State Audubon Society, Women's National League of Justice to the Indians, and the Indian Association of America. In addition to her writing on nature studies and school gardens, Miller authored several memoirs, including As I See It (1940), As I Did It, and Life Begins at Eighty, which provide personal accounts of her philosophy on living and unique life trajectory. She died in Cleveland in 1943 at the age of 89.