PREFACE 



In the hope of assisting others to attain greater joy and satisfac- 

 tion in the common growing of flowers, which he has himself courted 

 as an avocation from other weightier horticultural affairs for more 

 than thirty-five years, the writer gathers suggestions from his own 

 experience and enriches them with his observation and study of the 

 work of others who have also enjoyed the advantage of pursuing their 

 garden activities in California. 



Flower-growing includes a wide range of activity. On the one 

 hand it may lay hold upon a wealth of natural plant-beauty and 

 behavior and win for its votary, in the public eye, the semblance of 

 a botanist. On the other hand flower-growing may become so 

 thoroughly engrossed with artificial standards of size, variegation and 

 floriferousness and use so freely the agencies and materials which 

 promote them, that its successful operator may almost seem to be a 

 manufacturer. 



Both of these lofty extremes of flower-growing are equally beyond 

 the reach of this writer. He has never seen a "wild-garden" which 

 gave him any of the joy of a ramble in the woods or on the hillsides 

 or meadows. Even the same plants jumbled together could never 

 suggest to him that a corner of a back yard had the slightest approach 

 to wildness. The plants lack natural pose, or a corner of the fence 

 intrudes, or a domestic cat jumps out of the aquilegias or something 

 else always discloses deus ex machina. For this reason, although 

 free use of California native plants will be emphasized, the reader 

 will find herein no suggestion of a "wild-garden," nor of flowers 

 grown in a wild way, nor of a botanist with his notebook and tin- 

 ware nor of anything else which the ordinary reader might mistake 

 for science of any kind. 



And the same attitude will be observed toward the other extreme 

 of flower-growing the manufacturing art. No attempt will be made 

 to describe the way "florist flowers" are grown. In this case the 

 writer has no prejudice. He has no objection to blossoms of 

 colossal size nor to promotion of variation or abundance by heat, special 

 fertilizers and fine arts of handling, which are the business capital of 

 the florist. Nor does he object to intensive culture in the open air, 

 such as trenching, double trenching, etc., by which a man is ordered 

 to make deeper excavations for a bulb or a root, than were required 

 for the foundations of his cottage. All these things are laudable in 

 their way, but they are the properties of the professional gardeners, 

 who manufacture flowers either for the trade or for the home use of 



