248 POT-POURRI FROM A SURREY GARDEN 



large place should be without a room where gardening 

 books and weekly gardening papers are within easy 

 access of all the gardeners on the place, and no village 

 club in England could not afford to take in Mr. Eobinson's 

 excellent little weekly paper called ' Cottage Gardening,' 

 which I mentioned before. It costs one halfpenny, and 

 is full of all sorts of useful information. Surely at village 

 shows no better prize could be given than the back 

 numbers (bound) of this most useful publication. Mr. 

 Burbidge says : ' In America and in Germany the library 

 seems to be thought as essential to good gardening and 

 profitable land culture as here with us the seed room or 

 the tool shed; and in England we are beginning to 

 perceive the value of technical education, and to recognise 

 the vital importance of the most recent scientific dis- 

 coveries relating to our crops and their diseases, and the 

 soil in which they grow. Private garden libraries, while 

 most desirable, really form part of a much larger 

 and wider question. If libraries are essential for the 

 garden, surely they are even more so on the farm.' Mr. 

 Burbidge winds up : ' But to form libraries we must have 

 good and useful books, and I shall give a short list of 

 those I believe to be the best of their kind ; and one of 

 the best ways I know of getting the best gardening books 

 into the best hands is to award them as prizes to the 

 cultivators and exhibitors of garden produce at allotment- 

 garden and village flower shows.' With this I most 

 cordially agree. Then follows a list of thirty-eight books. 

 Another paper of great interest is on the importance 

 of British fruit-growing, from a food point of view, by Mr. 

 Edmund J. Baillie. 



