VI 



RETROSPECT 



many of these probably were not then in cultivation; that for 1892 made an annotated 

 inventory of the varieties of apples that had been and were in cultivation in North 

 America, showing that 878 varieties were actually offered for sale by American nur- 

 serymen 'in that year. But these volumes were isolated; they picked up the work 

 piece by piece. An inventory of the whole field, critically and laboriously made, was 

 needed before mere annals of yearly progress could signify much. We needed to know 

 our status; thereafter chronicles would have a meaning. 



From 1893, attention was given to the larger and comprehensive effort. A gar- 

 den herbarium had to be made, for there was none in the country. The first plant 

 had been put into this herbarium in 1889 ; it was a mere sprig of the greenhouse 

 shrub Boronia megastigma. There are difficulties in making a garden herbarium : 

 there are no professional collectors and one cannot buy specimens ; many cultivated 

 plants are too valuable to allow of specimens to be made. This herbarium now has 

 more than 12,000 mounted specimens. Although small, nevertheless it has been in- 

 valuable. If it does not show nearly all the species, it shows the range of variation 

 in some, and thereby suggests what may take place in all. It also shows what is 

 actually cultivated under a given name, whether that name be correct or not. 



Trial excursions were made into the evolution of various perplexed garden plants. 

 Some of these essays have been published. Out of these efforts grew the volume, 

 "Sketch of the Evolution of Our Native Fruits." The study of garden plants is a 

 different subject from the study of wild plants. Mere descriptions are often of little 

 value. The plant may have been bred away from the description within a decade. 

 Specific descriptions of many of the common garden plants do not exist in books : the 

 plants are not species in the book sense. 



American horticultural books must be collected, for the comprehensive work, if it 

 came, must contain American advice. One must know the range of New World ex- 

 perience and the occidental point of view. It has been the misfortune of many Ameri- 

 can writings that they have drawn too heavily from the experience of the Old World. 

 Once this was necessary, but now it is time to break away. Fifty authors have written 

 on viticulture in America, yet scarcely one has caught the spirit of the American grape- 

 growing. Nearly twenty years of collecting by the Editor has brought together the 

 completest library of American horticultural books. 



The details entering into any comprehensive cyclopedia of horticulture are astonish- 

 ing in number and variety. Consider some of the items: More than 10,000 species of 

 plants in cultivation; almost every important species phenomenally variable, sometimes 

 running into thousands of forms; every species requiring its own soil and treatment, 

 and sometimes even minor varieties differing in these requirements; limitless differences 

 in soils and climates in our great domain, every difference modifying the plants or their 

 requirements; a different ideal in plant -growing and plant -breeding in the mind of 

 every good plant-grower; as many different kinds of experience as there are men; many 

 of these men not facile with the pen, although full of wholesome fact and experience; 

 the species described in books which deal with the four corners of the earth; very few 

 botanists who have given much attention to the domestic flora. 



It was desired that the Cyclopedia be new brand-new from start to finish. The 

 illustrations were to be newly made ; the cultural suggestions written directly for the 

 occasion from American experience, and often presented from more than one point 01 

 view ; few of the precedents of former cyclopedias to be followed ; all matters to be 

 worked up by experts and from sources as nearly as possible original. Of course it 



