80 MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY 



of depression and stagnation. In the total publication list of ap- 

 proximately a thousand titles up to the end of last year, we find 

 that practically one-half have appeared since 1890, or say within a 

 period of twenty-five years; and that nearly one-half of that 

 number, or twenty-five per cent of the entire production of Ameri- 

 can gardening books from the very beginnings of time, is encom- 

 passed within the last ten or twelve years! Wherefore I prefer to 

 look into the future of things rather than to do more than call your 

 attention to the past. And besides it is safer. Who can say what 

 the future will develop? 



A canvas of the publications of the last ten years reveals that 

 out of about two hundred different titles issued and classified in 

 the publishers' trade lists, within the class and group headings of 

 Gardening and Horticulture, forty-seven, or about twenty-five 

 per cent., are devoted to fruit growing, which evidently still claims 

 a large share of attention; but various phases of pleasure garden- 

 ing (apart from landscape work) claim a slightly greater proportion, 

 being represented by fifty titles. Others are : Landscape, 1 1 ; vege- 

 tables and truck gardening, 31; literary, 13; children's garden 

 work, 9. 



Books devoted to technical landscape architecture are not con- 

 sidered in our present review, because although allied to gardening 

 and having tHeir origin there, still they deal with a subject matter 

 that is becoming rapidly divergent and tending to form a special 

 subject by itself. 



It will be observed that our writings offer very few treatises 

 devoted exclusively to one kind of flower or plant, although as 

 long ago as 1828 the first American book devoted wholly to flowers 

 appeared, assuming that Roland Green's Treatise on the Cultiva- 

 tion of Flowers, issued in Boston in that year, was really, as it seems 

 to be, the earliest. This is a little volume of only sixty pages and 

 is interesting as being possibly a fair reflection of the plants grown 

 at that time. Naturally, many subjects that are now almost as 

 household words among us, do not appear, and quite a number that 

 do appear there are not very seriously considered today, as myrtle, 

 camellia, fuchsia, passion flower. It would be well worth the 

 while of modern-day enthusiasts who clamor for old-fashioned 

 gardens, to look in the old garden books for the plants that they 



