JD. M. FERRY & CO’S DESCRIPTIVE CATALOGUE. 
3 
We hope the readers of our Seed Annual will discover its noticeable difference from many 
that are sent out, and from the general trend of modern seed catalogues. This is not a poorly 
bound pamphlet of cheap paper, filled with dauby but brilliant cuts of gigantic vegetables loaded 
upon liliputian trucks. The descriptions are not modeled after those of “ Gulliver’s Travels,” 
or a school-girl’s account of her last novel, nor are they thrown together without regard to 
arrangement or the convenience of the reader. On the other hand, it is not printed on heavy 
paper with wide margins, making a costly book, which the customer must in some way pay for, 
and which is more suited to the library or parlor table than for use in the garden. What we 
have endeavored, and we think successfully, to do, is to send you in a compact form a fair state¬ 
ment of our facilities for furnishing you with the best of seeds and such descriptions and illustra¬ 
tions, all of them made from the vegetables and flowers as grown by ourselves, as will enabie 
you intelligently to select the sorts best suited to your needs. In addition, we have given 
concise but plainly worded cultural directions, embodying the results of our extensive experience, 
observation and correspondence. We do this because we first want your order, and then that 
you should succeed so well with what we send you that you will send again. We have confidence 
enough in the good sense of the public to believe that we shall be more likely to secure and hold 
Scene on D. M. I-’srry &. Co s Greenfield Seed Farms— HOEING BEETS. 
permanent customers by taking the utmost care to offer only the best and with a fair statement 
of its merits, than by offering everything, good, bad and indifferent, with the bombast and 
exaggerated description with which many modern seed catalogues teem. 
Knowing must always precede the doing, and much of our knowledge of what to offer is 
gained 
AT OUR TRIAL GROUNDS. 
They are unquestionably the largest in America, and compare favorably with any in the 
world. We believe there are none where tests are more accurately and comparisons more 
carefully made. A competent and disinterested observer, who had visited for comparison all the 
trial grounds and state experimental stations in this country, said, after carefully examining 
them, that they were not only the largest, but that in the skill and care with which the work was 
done and the consequent reliability of the results obtained, they were by far the best of all. 
There from 
T,000 TO 9,000 TESTS ARE ANNUALLY MAI)E 
of the vitality and quality, not only of every lot of seeds we offer, but of samples of the standard 
kinds obtained from all the larger seedsmen of this country and Europe. We know not only the 
