CHAPTER IX. 

 FRENCH GARDENING. 



"While science devotes its chief attention to industrial pursuits, a 

 limited number of lovers of nature and a legion of workers whose very 

 names will remain unknown to posterity have created of late a quite new 

 agriculture, as superior to modern farming as modern farming is superior 

 to the old three fields system of our ancestors . . . They smile when 

 we boast about the rotation system having permitted us to take from the 

 field one crop every year, or four crops each three years, because their 

 ambition is to have six and nine crops from the very same plot of land 

 during the twelve months. They do not understand our talk about good 

 and bad soils because they make the soil themselves. . . ."- 



KROPOTKIN, Fields, Factories, and Workshops. 



IT was not until Kropotkin brought the achievements of 

 the Paris maraicher in the cultivation of vegetables pro- 

 minently before the notice of British readers that much 

 attention was paid in this country to the system of intensive 

 culture now popularly known as " French gardening." Follow- 

 ing the publication of his book interest was gradually aroused, 

 until at length a body of English horticulturists visited the 

 Paris gardens to inquire into the matter for themselves. As 

 a result, gardens were laid out and equipped on similar lines 

 in 1905 at Evesham in Worcestershire, and in 1906 at Mayland 

 in Essex, followed by a number of others, large and small, in 

 various parts of the country. 



Since that time French gardening has been made responsible 

 for many exaggerated statements, especially relative to the 

 profits to be derived from it, and many entirely unsuitable 

 persons have thus been induced to spend their capital in 

 projects which will, it is to be feared, in many cases end in 

 serious loss. 



But intensive culture needs no bolstering up by exaggeration. 

 Providing the gardener is experienced and the situation suitable 

 the crops which can be obtained under this system are 

 astounding to a person who is only acquainted with ordinary 



