PRELIMINARY REMARKS 



BY THE AUTHOR. 



ARDENING, in the minds of average people, is a 

 dreadful combination in its requirements of skill 

 and unceasing drudgery. Many, especially 

 farmers, doubt their ability to acquire the one 

 without giving more time and thought than they 

 can afford to devote to the garden, and fear the 

 other. Hence home gardening is often at a 

 discount. To disabuse the minds of the masses 

 of this only too common error, to convince people in rural 

 districts, and in the suburbs of cities, that gardening in reality is 

 a very strong combination of pleasure, health and profit, and to 

 point out the ways and means how to relieve the task of all 

 semblance of drudgery that is one of the aims, and perhaps the 

 chief one, of this volume. 



We have no reason to complain of lack of literature on the 

 subject of gardening at present. Every agricultural paper of the 

 day has a Horticultural Department, more or less prominent, and 

 often conducted by good practical men ; and some good monthlies 

 are almost exclusively devoted to horticulture, the only gap 

 existing now being a periodical devoted exclusively to vegetable 

 gardening a gap which still remains unfilled, less for want of 

 enterprise on the part of publishers than for lack of sufficient 

 support on the part of the masses who have as yet not awakened 

 to the importance of the subject. 



Our present rate of progress in the Art of Gardening is a 

 most rapid one. The methods have changed, and are changing 

 every day, decidedly in the direction and with the tendency of 

 cheapening the cost of production, lessening hand labor, and 

 making gardening more profitable and more pleasant. While 

 the gardener thus cannot with safety neglect to grasp the 

 opportunities which the publication of horticultural periodicals 

 offer to him for keeping himself informed about the progress we 

 are making, and the methods employed by the most successful 

 gardeners of the period, on the other hand he needs a guide 

 giving minute instructions in every department, a guide which 

 he can consult in an emergency, and from which he can learn 

 the very latest " cioss-cuts " to success ; a guide pointing out how 

 different the task of raising garden stuff is, or might be made, 



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