'2 The Subject 



associated with the olerarium, which is the olery or vege- 

 table-garden. ' Effort has been taken to make a new term 

 from plainer sources, as Day's vegecuUure* but this is 

 linguistically imperfect, although custom may eventually 

 sanction it, or something like it, and in that event 

 the justification will lie in considering it a contradiction of 

 "vegetable-culture"; vegeticuUure would be better. 



Historically, the garden vegetables are specially those of 

 edible herbage and root, eaten with meats or other foods 

 rather than as desserts. They are cooked as pot-herbs, or 

 eaten raw as salads. Cabbages and all their kind, spinach, 

 lettuce, beet-root, onion tribes, are of this class. But now 

 we add many fruits, and some of them are strictly desserts, 

 as the melons, which may be treated in European books 

 on fruit-culture, as strawberries may be treated in books 

 on vegetable-gardening. But the vegetables, in current 

 usage, are products of herbaceous plants and usually of 

 annuals, whereas the fruits (if we conveniently forget the 

 strawberry and do not define too closely with the banana 

 and a few others) are products of woody plants. But 

 although the definition may be difficult, my reader knows 

 what a vegetable is ; or if he does not know, he may more 

 or less inform himself as he turns these pages. 



The term vegetable-gardening, then, comprises a wide 

 range of products limited by usage. Associated with the 

 subject is also a large series of commercial questions in 

 manufacture, transportation, refrigeration, marketing. 

 This book deals primarily with the gardening phase of the 

 subject, as its title indicates, for " horticulture ends at the 



*Harry A. Day, F.R.H.S. Vegeculture : How to grow vegetables, salads, 

 and herbs in town and country, London, 1917. 



