House & Garden 
1-40 
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On House &P Ga 
(Continued fr 
T HE Rose in America, by J. 
Horace McFarland, The Macmillan 
Company. 
It is right and proper that Mr. 
McFarland should at last give us a book 
on roses. As a life-long rosarian, as 
the editor of The American Rose An¬ 
nual, as a public-spirited and immense¬ 
ly energetic citizen who has helped 
spread the gospel of roses throughout 
our country, he is peculiarly well 
equipped to write on this most fasci¬ 
nating of the flowers. Nor will the 
reader be disappointed, for Mr. 
McFarland has gathered between the 
covers of this book an appalling amount 
of rose lore. Reading it is like sitting 
down to a Thanksgiving dinner—every¬ 
thing is there, including the “fixin’s”. 
Being a good citizen, as we have 
said, it was logical that he should begin 
his book with a statement on the posi¬ 
tion of the rose in America. This he 
follows with a consideration of the 
usual roses and their origins—old 
friends of every garden lover—and 
then the unusual roses, with which 
some of us may not be so well ac¬ 
quainted. Having introduced the 
various members of the rose family, he 
settles down to a discussion of the rose 
plant itself, how to use roses to the 
best advantage, on roses in parks, on 
making roses grow and bloom, on the 
art and mystery of pruning and on 
protecting roses from insects and dis¬ 
eases. The last three chapters are de¬ 
voted to wintering roses, rose varieties 
for the beginner to choose from, and 
on rose hybridization. 
At first it would seem that this is an 
encyclopaedic effort, but Mr. McFarland 
has avoided the temptation to 
which many rose authorities have suc¬ 
cumbed in that he has not cast an air 
of mystery about roses and growing 
them. He doesn’t make it seem either 
esoteric or too difficult. While there 
is a vast amount of research and 
patient experiment evident in his pages, 
he presents the facts of his efforts in 
the simplest, understandable form. 
Consequently the book is one that both 
the amateur and the rose scholar can 
use with profit and enjoyment. It 
deserves ranking with Dean Hole and 
Pemberton, with George C. Thomas 
and the other great authoritative rose 
books of the world, for it presents the 
practical and scholarly advantages of 
Pemberton and Thomas and something 
of the great heart which made Dean 
Hole’s work on roses so beloved of all 
devotees to the Queen of Flowers. 
T HE Book of Building and In¬ 
terior Decorating. Edited by 
Reginald T. Townsend, Doubleday, 
Page & Company. 
All hail to our contemporary, Coun¬ 
try Life in America, on the publishing 
of their Book of Building and Interior 
Decorating, edited from material which 
appeared in the magazine. The colla¬ 
tion is by Reginald T. Townsend, and 
shows in its selection and arrangement 
a very keen appreciation of what peo¬ 
ple want. Its variety in text and il¬ 
lustration covers a wide range of 
things pertaining to building and fur¬ 
nishing, and we hope that there 
breathes not a man (or woman) “with 
soul so dead’’, as to find nothing helpful 
in it. 
When the era in which we are at 
present living can be seen retrospec¬ 
tively down a perspective of a hundred 
years or so, there is a singularly inter¬ 
esting point which should be brought 
out by such writers as concern them¬ 
selves with the history of taste. By all 
means they should accord to the maga¬ 
zines of this era, particularly those of 
den’s Book Shelf 
om page 13S) 
the special nature of “Country Life”, 
their full credit for stimulating an ever 
wider desire for better things, better 
homes, better furniture. 
Month after month and year after 
year these magazines have patiently 
selected and published the best contem¬ 
porary building and furnishing, secured 
photographs of it and presented it in a 
popular form. A knowledge of period 
furniture, at least a fair familiarity 
with it, is no longer the sole property 
of the erudite connoisseur. 
Gradually the public has come to de¬ 
mand good design from American 
manufacturers, and has in every way 
extended the boundaries of good taste 
until the well designed and well fur¬ 
nished home is no longer generally un¬ 
attainable. 
From all published material may be 
gleaned ideas and suggestions for spe¬ 
cific problems, even though the term 
“practical” in this connection should 
not always be taken too literally. The 
practical help which can be had from 
any published material depends very 
largely upon the individual. People of 
alert and adaptive natures can derive 
practical help from the merest sugges¬ 
tion, while people of the opposite type 
of mind will fail to get any practical 
help even though you give them a set 
of blue-prints. They still ask: “Is this 
a window or a door?—and which side 
should I have the hinges put on?” 
They cling to a vague hope that there 
is some magic abracadabra in the 
printed word which will take the place 
of individual thought. This type of 
mind is easy to stimulate, because it 
still believes in the pot of gold at the 
rainbow’s foot—but difficult to help, 
for the same reason. 
The real measure of the practicality 
of a book is the practicality of its 
reader. This is by way of interpreting 
Mr. Townsend’s “Foreword”, and of 
conveying the thought that in the great 
adventure of building no one of us who 
selects, edits and publishes helpful ma¬ 
terial is vested with the power to dry 
up the Red Sea so that all may walk 
dry-shod, across it. We wish we had— 
and spend our time building as comfort¬ 
able and accommodating rafts as we 
can. 
T HE Bungalow Book, by Charles 
E. White, Jr., The Macmillan 
Company. 
The author of “Successful Houses and 
How to Build Them” has written a 
practical handbook on bungalows. It 
is arranged in an excellently practical 
manner, with a really generous quantity 
of specific information. Specific infor¬ 
mation, after all, is what most people 
want. Matters of taste and style gen¬ 
erally find themselves classed, rightly 
or wrongly, as matters of opinion. 
Sometimes, far too often, in fact, they 
are left out of the picture entirely. 
But whether one kind of roof will leak 
and another won’t is classed, rightly, as 
a matter of fact. 
In the systematic arrangement and 
presentation of such facts as this, Mr. 
White has done no small service to a 
very large group of prospective 
builders, and has lived up to the ex¬ 
pectations we would naturally have of 
a man who could hit upon such an 
appealing book title as his previous 
one: “Successful Houses and How to' 
Build Them”. 
Certainly people who build bunga¬ 
lows, which can, without unduly 
stretching a point, be called houses, 
want these dwellings to be successful. 
They also want to know how to be 
sure of this happy outcome of the ad- 
(Continued on page 142) 
