PREFACE. xiii 



far from correcting the problem, would add to the confusion even more. It's certain that 

 gardeners always will prefer the names that they've got from their proprietors, and that 

 they've been used to since childhood, to those that we might put in our treatise. So a 

 uniform nomenclature hardly can be hoped for, though doubtlessly that would be desirable. 

 We agree that most names of trees are meaningless. But can we hope to create names for 

 them in our own language that express their nature and their qualities? Have the people 

 whom we look up to as our superiors in matters of taste actually done better at naming 

 trees? Are Uva Apiana, Pyra Dolabelliana better than fly pear and Orleans plum? For this 

 reason we've kept the common names. When a tree has several names, we've indicated 

 them, taking care to list first the one that's used the most. To a great extent, the liberties 

 that have been taken with changing plant names have obstructed the progress of botany, or 

 at minimum have made its study very difficult. 



It certainly would be useful to be able to tell definitively which one is the species 

 and which is the variety. But those who have studied the natural history of trees must agree 

 that this is impossible for trees that take a long time to bear fruit & even longer to 

 reproduce from seeds. If you can see that a grain of wheat produces wheat, a grain of rye 

 produces rye, and that a grain of barley produces barley, then you are entitled to conclude 

 that wheat, rye, and barley are separate species. We have tried similar experiments on fruit 

 trees, 



