December, 1912 AMERICAN HOMES AND GARDENS XV 
HARPER'S GUIDE TO WILD Flowers. By 
Mrs. Caroline A. Creevey. New York: 
Harper & Brothers: 1912. Cloth. 8vo. 
Illustrated. 555 pp. Price, $1.75 net. 
This excellent volume explains the 
easiest way of identifying wild flowers and 
plants by a reliable system of classifica- 
tion. As a guide to the flowering plants 
growing wild in New England, the Atlantic 
seaboard, the Middle States and, to a lesser 
extent in the Southern States, Mrs, Cree- 
vey’s book can be recommended as reliable, 
handy, and entertaining. The full page 
drawings are carefully executed and are 
generously supplied throughout the pages. 
Royat GARDENS. By Cyril Ward. New 
York and London: Longmans, Green & 
Go: 1912. Cloth. Large 8vo.  Illus- 
trated in color. 182 pp. Price, $5 net. 
“Good taste and a feeling for color helps 
one to make a garden an entirely suitable 
setting for the house; and a sense of pro- 
portion and fitness will come to his aid in 
designing all details. Paths for convenience 
in working, and ease in visiting the various 
parts of the garden, will, as it were, sug- 
gest themselves. And garden accessories, 
for convenience, for appearance and for in- 
terest, will be designed with such wise and 
careful taste, that they will appear thor- 
oughly at home in the places chosen for 
them, and will increase not only the use- 
fulness and comfort, but will add, also, to 
the beauty of the garden,” so writes Mr. 
Ward in the concluding chapter of his de- 
lightful and handsome volume on “Royal 
Gardens.” The chapters of this book are 
so arranged that the exquisite plates accom- 
panying it present a full garden year from 
daffodils at Windsor Castle and Spring 
flowering shrubs at Bagshot Park to chrys- 
anthemums at Claremont and Autumn flow- 
ers at Sandringham ;-and the gardens herein 
depicted include, in one or other, examples 
of the whole art of garden design as prac- 
ticed in Great Britain during the last three 
or four centuries. That they are cultivated 
to-day with a hearty acceptance of every 
step in progress made in the science of 
horticulture should be a matter of interest 
to every garden lover inasmuch as it in- 
dicates that an old established garden needs 
just as much care to keep it to perfection 
as does a newer one. There is not an unin- 
teresting page in Mr. Ward’s beautiful 
book. 
VAGABOND JOURNEYS. By Percival Pollard. 
~ New York: The Neale Publishing Com- 
pany: 1911. Cloth, 8vo. 328 pp. Price, 
$2 net. 
Ali who have read Percival Pollard’s 
book of criticism published a year ago, 
“Their Day in Court: The Case of Ameri- 
can Letters and its Causes,” which was re- 
viewed by AMERICAN HoMEs AND GARDENS 
some months ago, will eagerly seek this 
volume, which does not pander so much to 
the needs of travelers as to their sense 
of humor. The book does not profess to 
inform. It does no: direct us how to get 
there; what luggage to take; nor instruct 
us as to what must be seen, what avoided. 
All such general orders, the author wrote, 
surely affect only those that admit them- 
selves without identity of their own—the 
members of the rabble. This book is ad- 
dressed to individuals. It is the whimsical 
record of an individual’s adventures along 
the primrose path of entertainment. The 
book’s range of comparisons, between Ber- 
lin and Boston, London and New York, 
Paris and Washington, will give the stud- 
ent of our central modern civilization plenty 
of food for thought. 
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