GARDEN WRITINGS IN AMERICA 77 



Here, indeed, is a wide field for development, and one which 

 perhaps most concerns our present purposes. This type of writing, 

 in connection with the third group of Record and Description, is 

 suggestive of the future of our writings. 



Would that we had many more of this class of book which reflects 

 the sheer joy and delight of the living companionship of the growing 

 plants, the fascination of nursing the tender exotic, the rapt delight 

 of opening spring and ripening autumn. These books treat not of 

 gardens as things apart, but as integral elements in the round of our 

 daih' existence. The appearance of several such within the last 

 few years is a reflection of rapidly changing conditions of our 

 environment. 



Though to the contemporary teacher and student these writings 

 have perhaps only a moderate value, yet they are strongly signifi- 

 cant of the new garden spirit that is enveloping all America. Let 

 us encourage them by every means in our power for they are 

 spreading the gospel of popular home gardening, of personal 

 gardening, like that which is recognized as having existed in Eng- 

 land for a long time past, so that it has come to be a recognized 

 habit to compare the garden interests of the two sides of the ocean, 

 to the disadvantage of our own. 



Just as real, permanent progress in our widespread American 

 horticulture (of the garden) must rest on the development of the 

 amateur as distinguished from the mere trader, so, too, must we 

 look to a literature of enthusiasm based on the amateur's keen 

 interest in others of the same class to develop and at the same time 

 to reflect the present-day condition. Authoritative gardening 

 writings come to us from England today even as in the earlier 

 times. But as yet we send very few thither. Still I have not the 

 least doubt in the world of our ability to eventually produce our 

 counterparts of Miss Jekyll, Miss Willmott, Reginald Farrar, 

 Joseph Jacob, and others too numerous to name, but all of whom 

 have given the world garden books based on personal experiences 

 and enthusiasm. Keenly critical, too, they are monuments 

 marking the progress of our delightful craft. This, of course, 

 presupposes the existence of competent authors, well informed 

 amateurs, to make experiments, suffer trials and disappointments, 

 achieve successes, and then chronicle them. 



