SOME BOOKS FOR AN AMATEUR GARDENER'S LIBRARY. 40I 



SOME GOOD BOOKS FOR AN AMATEUR GARDENER'S 



LIBRARY. 



By E. A. Bowles, M.A., F.L.S. 



[Read November 3, 1914 ; Dr. F. Keeble in the Chair.] 



So runs the title chosen by your good Secretary when he invited me 

 to give the lecture here to-day. Like all of his work, it shows width 

 of scope combined with useful limitations. For there is scarcely 

 any book on gardening that would not be of some value on an 

 amateur's bookshelves, even though it were but to show from 

 whence people derive their mistaken notions — as a tutor once said 

 to me when at Cambridge, in warning me against the use of a certain 

 commentary — " Oh yes, I have it on my bookshelf, but I only use 

 it to find out where you all get your mistakes from." 



But I am bound to put a check on the list by the first word " some," 

 and to select with judgment that they may be good. Even then 

 it would not be possible in the allotted time to do much more than 

 mention the titles of books good for an amateur with a catholic taste 

 in gardening, so I have thought it better to restrict this afternoon's 

 lecture to passing in short review some of the most useful books on 

 general gardening, endeavouring to point out the characteristics 

 that seem to me to fit them for different requirements demanded by 

 an amateur gardener, and to notice first Encyclopaedias and then 

 books by amateurs embodying their own experiences. 



For one interested in the flower garden only, Robinson's " English 

 Flower Garden " is absolutely indispensable. It was my first love 

 among modern gardening books, and I have helped to turn many 

 another beginner besides myself into a keen and thorough gardener 

 by presenting him with a copy of this book. 



I consider it contains more useful knowledge about the plants 

 suitable for English gardens than any book of its size, which is 

 saying a good deal when one realizes that it is an octavo volume of 

 over 900 pages. Almost every page contains one or more charmingly 

 artistic illustrations, mostly engraved from photographs. 



The book itself has grown as a good garden does, by the addition 

 from year to year of all that was suited to improve it, until now in 

 its latest edition, the 12th, which appeared in 1913, nearly half the 

 book deals with the artistic side of the work, and garden planning 

 from every conceivable point of view, and the alphabetical list of 

 plants completes the volume. To this portion the best experts of the 

 day contributed articles on the famihes of plants they had specially 

 studied, such contributions generally being marked by their initials. 



