BOOK REVIEWS 



The World Was My Garden* 



G. T. Hastings 



This autobiography is also a history of the introduction of 

 useful foreign plants into the United States and of the develop- 

 ment of the Section of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction, 

 later the Division of Plant Exploration and Introduction, of 

 the Department of Agriculture. A brief account of the author's 

 boyhood in Michigan and Kansas, his college days, work as a 

 plant pathologist in Washington and graduate study in Naples 

 and Germany, leads up to his first trip to Java as a protege 

 of Barbour Lathrop. Once in contact with the tropics and a 

 multitude of new economic plants the Plant Explorer developed. 

 The remainder and, much the greater part of the volume — 

 one every lover of plants will read with delight — carries us 

 around the world, east, west, north, south — seeing both strange 

 and familiar plants and meeting plant growers in all lands. 

 Many plants now familiar to everyone were strangers to this 

 country when David Fairchild began his work of sending or 

 bringing new plants home. Dates, avocados, mangos, papayas, 

 new citrus fruits, flowering cherries, vegetables of many kinds, 

 new wheats and barleys, fodder plants; plants for semitropi- 

 cal Florida and California, hardy plants for northern states; 

 merely to list all the plants he was instrumental in introduc- 

 ing or improving would take more space than can be given 

 to this review. He has enriched our agriculture and horticul- 

 ture as few others have done. Dr. T. D. A. Cockerell in re- 

 viewii>g this book in Science states "his contributions to horti- 

 culture and thus to human welfare have been so great that he 

 deserves to rank with those who have done most for the country 

 and the world." The development of gardens in Florida, 

 Georgia, California, North Dakota, Panama and near Wash- 

 ington, D. C. where new plants could be tested and from which 

 they could be distributed is described. He says little of himself, 

 much of those who helped in his work, but reading between the 

 lines it is easy to see that the. courteous friendly treatment he 



* The World Was My Garden. David Fairchild. Charles Scribner's Sons. 

 1938. 494 pages, 130 plates. $3.75. 



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