PREFACE vii 



weekly, which is not subscribed for, but bought from news-stands. 

 These weeklies contain little that would help our beginners. They 

 are full of news of shows and prizes, accounts of meetings, de- 

 scriptions of new and rare plants, abstracts ofbulletins and papers, 

 notes of travel, letters from foreign correspondents, reviews of 

 genera in alphabetic order, plants named for beginners, descriptions 

 of nurseries and estates, short letters from gardeners, and obitu- 

 aries. All these items are respectable and eventually we shall 

 get to them, but at the present time no American periodical 

 could live a year which fed its customers on such small fare. 

 We need heartier food. The scrap-book of short articles is all 

 well enough, but we also want long articles about the most 

 important subjects. 



So too with books. It is not merely the difference in climate; 

 the Old World models won't do. The English are far ahead of us 

 in books by skilled amateurs who describe their own gardens, but 

 too often they are content with the dry husks of history, es- 

 pecially family history, and with heaping alphabets upon alpha- 

 bets. But the one blight which I dread most is the habit of 

 assuming that the reader knows it all. No other attitude is con- 

 sidered polite. Therefore all facts and instructions must be 

 imparted indirectly and casually. We want to know just how 

 to grow everything worth while. We like our garden writers 

 to assume that we know nothing or have forgotten, and want to 

 know all about it in the quickest time. Our best writers will 

 follow the national instinct for picking at the biggest jobs and 

 hitting them hardest. The new American horticultural literature 

 must have simplicity, directness and force, or it will be merely 

 parasitic upon the trade. 



Another feature of this book that may seem unconventional 



