In My Vicarage Garden 



such books he can reckon the Botanical Magazine, 

 for I should consider it as almost, if not quite, the 

 first work to be desired in a botanical library. 

 With its 127 volumes, containing 7800 plates of 

 flowers, it is a library in itself; and though its 

 early volumes are more than a hundred years old 

 (it commenced in 1787), yet it has always been 

 conducted on the same lines, and the older 

 volumes are especially interesting. Mr Bright, in 

 his Year in a Lancashire Garden, records for his 

 December work : 



We have been looking over old volumes of Curtis's 

 Botanical Magazine, and have been trying, not always 

 successfully, to get a number of old forgotten plants of 

 beauty, now of rarity. 



It has been my good fortune always to have 

 had access to Curtis, and it has been my pleasure, 

 too, to hunt up in it the old plants which were a 

 pleasure to our fathers and grandfathers ; and I 

 never look through a volume without learning 

 something new. The entire work is expensive, 

 and not easily procured, but the fifty-two volumes 

 of the first series can be bought cheaply, and odd 

 volumes are often on sale for very little, and as 

 each volume is complete in itself, I know of few 

 more useful books to give to a young gardener 

 than a few volumes of the Botanical Magazine. 



Another excellent book of about the same age 

 is Miller's Gardener's Dictionary, a book often 

 seen on the bookshelves of good libraries, but not 

 often read. Yet it is full of information from 



74 



