4 i4 



AMERICAN HOMES AND GARDENS 



December, 1905 



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beautiful plants. But a good book on so 

 lovely a subject must greatly widen the culti- 

 vation of these plants and tempt those who do 

 not grow them to plant them in their gardens. 

 This is exactly the purpose of the volume 

 which Mr. Cook has edited from two English 

 garden periodicals. A dozen writers have con- 

 tributed to the book which thus represents the 

 expert advice and opinions of as many able 

 writers. It is a book alive with suggestion 

 and filled with hints of the most practical 

 character on the cultivation of the carnation 

 and pink. 



Although pinks and carnations are welcome 

 in so many ways of gardening, says Mr. Cook, 

 perhaps their greatest use, other than in wall 

 and rock work, is as edgings and underplant- 

 ings to roses, or something of taller stature 

 than their own. By " edgings," he does not 

 mean straight or stiff borderings only, though 

 the white pink and its forms are among the 

 very best plants for this use, but informal 

 fillings of the outer portions of beds and 

 borders. Used like this with roses they are 

 admirable, each plant enhancing the beauty of 

 the other. They are, he adds, perhaps least 

 suited for filling up whole beds, unless the beds 

 are quite small and especially narrow in form. 



The book begins with a brief early history 

 cf the plants, followed by others on the Carna- 

 tion in the Garden, the Border Carnation, the 

 Picotee, white and yellow ground, the Mal- 

 maison Carnation, the Tree or Perpetual 

 Flowering Carnation, Carnations for Exhibi- 

 tion, Carnations in Town Garden, Carnation 

 Growing in America, Diseases of the Carna- 

 tion, the Pink, the Wild Pinks, and the Pinks 

 of the Alps. The range of topics is, there- 

 fore, very complete and thoroughly compre- 

 hensive. 



This is by no means a book on easy methods 

 of carnation growing; but it presents all the 

 essential facts of carnation and pink culture. 

 It is very much more than a guide to ways and 

 means. Flowers must not only be grown to 

 produce flowers, but they must be grown in an 

 artistic way, so that their individual beauty 

 will contribute its full share to a general effect. 

 This aspect of carnation cultivation — by no 

 means its least important aspect — is referred 

 to on almost every page of this book, the true 

 and only way of exciting a genuine love for 

 flowers. It contains a number of half-tone 

 illustrations, reproduced in an extraordinarily 

 beautiful way, illustrating individual plants 

 and their use in the garden. 



The Gardens of Italy 



The Gardens of Italy. By Charles 

 Latham, with descriptions by E. March 

 Phillipps. London : Country Life, Lim- 

 ited, 1905. New York: Charles Scrib- 

 ner's Sons. 2 vols., folio, pp. 159+144. 

 Price, $18.00 net. 



The Italian villa is essentially a pleasure 

 house, and the Florentines of the Renaissance 

 spent so much of their time in their villas that 

 some of their contemporaries considered that 

 they were insane. Within a radius of twenty 

 miles of the Tuscan capital there were twenty 

 thousand estates with eight hundred palaces 

 built of cut stone. The " Italian garden " is a 

 complement of the " Italian villa," and when 

 they are combined the result is one of the most 

 charming sights in the world. An " Italian 

 garden" can be created almost anywhere, but it 

 is in this wonderful land of an old civilization, 

 gifted with so transcendent a share of natural 

 beauty, that this combination of art and nature 

 is at its best. Glades, woodland, terraces, 



