PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 



(1840.) 



This book is written in the hope of providing the intelligent 

 gardener, and the scientific amateur, correctly, with' the 

 rationalia of the more important operations of Horticulture ; in 

 the full persuasion that, if the physiological principles on 

 which such operations, of necessity, depend, were correctly 

 appreciated by the great mass of active-minded persons now 

 engaged in gardening in this country, the grounds of their 

 practice would be settled upon a more satisfactory foundation 

 than can at present be said to exist. It is, I confess, sur- 

 prising to me, that the real nature of the vital actions of plants, 

 and of the external forces by which they are regulated, should 

 be so frequently misapprehended even among writers upon 

 Horticulture ; and that ideas relating to such matters, so very 

 incorrect as we frequently find them to be, should obtain 

 among intelligent men, in the present state of what I may be 

 permitted to call horticultural physiology. There must be a 

 great want of sound knowledge of this subject, when we find 

 an author, who has made himself distinguished in the history 

 df English gardening, giving it as his opinion, " that the weali 

 drawn state of forced Asparagus in London is occasioned by 

 the action of the dung immediately upon its roots ! " 



It does not seem possible to account for this in any other 

 way than by referring it to the want of some short guide to the 

 horticultural application of vegetable physiology, unmixed with 



