_THIRD EDITION_
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
1903
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1900
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
***
Set up and electrotyped March, 1900
Reprinted February, 1901, and June, 1903
Mount Pleasant Press
J. Horace McFarland Company
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Like the love of music, books and pictures, the love of gardens comes
with culture and leisure and with the ripening of the home life. The
love of gardens, as of every other beautiful and refining thing, must
increase to the end of time. More and more must the sympathies enlarge.
There must be more points of contact with the world. Life ever becomes
richer. Gardening is more than the growing of plants: it is the
expression of desire.
As there must be many gardeners, so there must be many books. There must
be books for different persons and different ideals. The garden made by
one's own hands is always the best garden, because it is a part of
oneself. A garden made by another may interest, but it is another
person's individuality. A poor garden of one's own is better than a good
garden in which one may not dig. Many a poor soul has more help in a
plant in the window than another has in a plantation made by a gardener.
I would emphasize the home garden, made by the members of the family. I
would preach the beauty of the common plants and the familiar places.
These things are never old. Many times I have noted how intently an
audience of plant-lovers will listen to the most commonplace details
respecting the cultivation of plants with which they have been always
familiar. There was nothing new in what they heard; but they liked to
have the old story told over again, and every detail called up a memory.
The same questions are asked every year, and they always will be
asked,--the questions about the simplest garden operations. Upon this
desire for commonplace advice the horticultural journals live. A journal
which publishes only things that are new would find little support. Some
of these common questions I have tried to answer in this little book. I
wish them answered in the simple and direct phrase of the gardener.
Therefore I asked my friend C. E. Hunn, gardener to the Horticultural
Department of Cornell University, who lives with plants, to write advice
for one who would make a garden; and this he did in a summer vacation.
These notes, edited and amplified, now make this book.