68 
House & Garden 
'iitiiiiiiiiniiiniititiiiiiiiMi"i 
—and it’s homing time for 
every living creature 
Nature, bursting into the full bloom of life 
each year, stirs the instincflive love of home 
and companionship in man, bird and beast— 
and each builds in his own way. 
To you who yearn for a home of your own, 
the building of a bird’s nest points a way. 
The bird never hesitates, but chooses his 
place and then works diligently until his little 
home is finished. Why not try it yourselves? 
Arkansas 
Soft Pine 
will go far in keeping material costs down, 
in providing a staunch house strucfture, 
and in affording an interior woodwork of 
unsurpassed beauty. 
Our folio of home designs and finished sam^ 
pies, sent on request, complete this interest^ 
ing story. Write now and look into it further. 
Arkansas Soft Pine Is Trade Marked and 
Sold by Dealers East of the Rocl{ies 
Arkansas Soft Pine Bureau 
6j 2 Boyle Building . 
Little Rock ^ Arkansas 
jiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii 
Collecting Old-Time Garden Books 
(Continued from page 35) 
lematic garden manual, which is not so 
very systematic after all! John Reid’s 
The Scots Gardener (1683) seems to be 
the forerunner of the regional garden 
books and A Garden of All Sorts of 
Pleasant Flowers, Which Our English 
Air Will Permit to be Nursed Up, by 
“John Parkenson, Apothecary of Lon¬ 
don”, a folio of 1629 (a later edition 
is dated 1656), is representative of the 
early English works on gardening. This 
same author’s A Theatre of Plants 
(1640) is a treasure in old-time garden 
literature not to be overlooked. 
Those ancient garden tomes were 
often quaintly illustrated, many of them 
exquisitely. To have a copy of Crispin 
de Passe’s Hortus Floridus (Utrecht, 
1615) or his Book of Beasts, Birds, 
Flowers, Fruits, etc., would be to court 
covetousness! Again, tbe title pages en¬ 
graved for old garden books by William 
Marshall are a joy in themselves. 
The old printed Herbals, French, 
Italian, Dutch and English will tempt 
the collector, but none of them so much 
as John Gerarde’s The Herbal, or Gen¬ 
eral History of Plants, a folio of 1591, 
and (as edited by Tbomas Johnson) in 
editions dated 1633 and 1636, although 
it was preceded by The Great Herbal of 
1516, The Little Herbal of 1525 and 
others. 
Only a fortnight ago I heard of a copy 
of Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarium, al¬ 
most at a to-be-given-away price, but 
alas! when I hastened to present myself 
as a buyer some other garden-lover had 
been before me. Why, I ask myself, 
did I wait until after luncheon to seek 
it out! One must take no risks when 
it comes to acquiring a “find”! 
One cannot e.xpect, of course, to find 
at every turn such rarities as the fa¬ 
mous Herbarius, illustrated with numer¬ 
ous woodcuts of plants, printed at Pas- 
sau by Johann Petrie in 1485. Even 
the .jiSOO asked by an English book¬ 
seller in war-time for it, is reasonable 
enough for a fine copy. 
Early American garden literature has 
many items of collectors’ interest. There 
is Toiler’s Almanac for South Carolina, 
1752, containing a "Gardener’s Kalen- 
dar” and following it come many such 
Almanac items. Robert Squibbs’ Gar¬ 
dener’s Kalendar (Charleston, S. C., 
1787) was probably the first regular 
American gardening book. Of course, 
there had been such works as John 
Allen’s The Husbandman’s Guide (Bos¬ 
ton, 1712), but such books had to do 
with husbandry rather than with gar¬ 
dening. The American edition of Mar¬ 
shall’s Introduction to the Knowledge 
and Practice of Gardening (Boston, 
1799), was the second horticultural 
work printed in America, while The 
American Gardener (Washington) by 
John Gardiner and David Hepburn 
was the second indigenous one. Roland 
Green’s Treatise on the Cultivation of 
Flowers (Boston, 1828) was the first 
American book wholly devoted to 
flowers and it was not until 1839 that 
a monograph on single flowers was 
printed in America—Edward Sayers’ 
Treatise on the Cultivation of the 
Dahlia and Cactus (Boston). 
But this is not to be a bibliography, 
dear reader—I leave that as a task for 
another. This little peep into the realm 
of old-time garden lore is merely in¬ 
tended to give you a glimpse of the 
fascination exercised by the garden 
books of Yesterday. You may seek in 
vain for Aphorismas Botanicae by Gus¬ 
tav Herman Kehr, Tubingen, 1633, the 
Treatise on Breadfruit by Nascher, 1758, 
or books by Lorenz Wenceslas Kerck- 
hove, Claus Kjoeping, Edouard Louis 
Mortier, Jacques du Vivier because the 
startling announcement has been made 
that these names, with five others, ap¬ 
pearing gravely in a biographical work 
which had been accepted unchallenged 
until recently, were pure figments of the 
imagination, that such botanists had 
never lived and had never written the 
works accredited to them! Rainbows 
for chasing indeed! 
But we shall not miss the fictitious 
while we have Master Gerarde, Francis 
Bacon, John Evelyn, Sir William Tem¬ 
ple and Horace Walpole. And do not 
let us forget to go back to Bernard 
Palissy, to add to the other perennials 
of delight that we shall plant for the 
happy harvest of enjoyment we hope 
to gather in our Garden of Books. 
CATALOGUE 
D’ARBRES, ARBUSTES 
EX PLANTES HERBACLES D'AMERIQUE, 
Par M. YONG^ Botanijlc de Pcnfyhanit. 
Cc Catalogue eft divife cn deux parties •, I.i pre- 
roiere conticur ics Plantes que M. Yong pent tpixrmr 
aux Eiiropiens, foU eu graincs, foit cn plants. 
La fccondc contieiit cellcs ipi’on ne pourra fc pro- 
A T A R I S, 
Dc rjtnpriint'iie de !.t V.* H i n i s s a n T, Imprimcur 
du Cabinet du ROI, M-iifon & B.atimens 
de SA MAJESTY. 
. . -- ,1 
M. DCC LXXXIII. 
See Page SD-Xo. 979 
Title page of an early catalog of 
plants, bearing the autograph of R. 
Barclay 
