_What a garden is_
CHAPTER II. THE GENERAL PLAN OR THEORY OF THE PLACE
_The plan of the grounds_
_The picture in the landscape_
_Birds; and cats_
_The planting is part of the design or picture_
_The flower-growing should be part of the design_
Defects in flower-growing
Lawn flower-beds
Flower-borders
The old-fashioned garden
Contents of the flower-borders
_The value of plants may lie in foliage and form rather than in bloom_
Odd and formal trees
Poplars and the like
Plant-forms
_Various specific examples_
An example
Another example
A third example
A small back yard
A city lot
General remarks
_Review_
CHAPTER III. EXECUTION OF SOME OF THE LANDSCAPE FEATURES
_The grading_
_The terrace_
_The bounding lines_
_Walks and drives_
The question of drainage, curbing, and gutters
The materials
_Making the borders_
_Making the lawn_
Preparing the ground
The kind of grass
When and how to sow the seed
Securing a firm sod
The mowing
Fall treatment
Spring treatment
Watering lawns
Sodding the lawn
A combination of sodding and seeding
Sowing with sod
Other ground covers
CHAPTER IV. THE HANDLING OF THE LAND
_The draining of the land_
_Trenching and subsoiling_
_Preparation of the surface_
_The saving of moisture_
_Hand tools for weeding and subsequent tillage and other hand work_
The hoe
Scarifiers
Hand-weeders
Trowels and their kind
Rollers
Markers
_Enriching the land_
CHAPTER V. THE HANDLING OF THE PLANTS
_Sowing the seeds_
_Propagating by cuttings_
Dormant stem-cuttings
Cuttings of roots
Green cuttings
Cuttings of leaves
General treatment
_Transplanting young seedlings_
_Transplanting established plants and trees_
Tub-plants
When to transplant
Depth to transplant
Making the rows straight
Cutting-back; filling
Removing very large trees
_Winter protection of plants_
_Pruning_
_Tree surgery and protection_
Tree guards
Mice and rabbits
Girdled trees
Repairing street trees
_The grafting of plants_
_Keeping records of the plantation_
_The storing of fruits and vegetables_
_The forcing of plants_
Coldframes
Hotbeds
Management of hotbeds
CHAPTER VI. PROTECTING PLANTS FROM THINGS THAT PREY ON THEM
_Screens and covers_
_Fumigating_
_Soaking tubers and seeds_
_Spraying_
_Insecticide spraying formulas_
_Fungicide spraying formulas_
_Treatment for some of the common insects_
_Treatment for some of the common plant diseases_
CHAPTER VII. THE GROWING OF THE ORNAMENTAL PLANTS—THE CLASSES OF
PLANTS, AND LISTS
_Planting for immediate effect_
_The use of “foliage” trees and shrubs_
_Windbreaks and screens_
_The making of hedges_
_The borders_
_The flower-beds_
Bedding effects
Plants for subtropical effects
_Aquatic and bog plants_
_Rockeries and alpine plants_
1. PLANTS FOR CARPET-BEDS
_Lists for carpet-beds_
2. THE ANNUAL PLANTS
_List of annuals by color of flowers_
_Useful annuals for edgings of beds and walks, and for ribbon-beds_
_Annuals that continue to bloom after frost_
_List of annuals suitable for bedding_ (_that is, for “mass-effects” of
color_)
_List of annuals by height_
_Distances for planting annuals_
3. HARDY HERBACEOUS PERENNIALS
_Perennial herbs suitable for lawn and “planting” effects_
_A brief seasonal flower-garden or border list of herbaceous
perennials_
_One hundred extra-hardy perennial herbs_
4. BULBS AND TUBERS
_Fall-planted bulbs_
_List of outdoor fall-planted bulbs for the North_
_Winter bulbs_
_Summer bulbs_
5. THE SHRUBBERY
_List of shrubbery plants for the North_
_Shrubs for the South_
6. CLIMBING PLANTS
_Annual herbaceous climbers_
_Perennial herbaceous climbers_
_Woody perennial climbers_
_Climbing roses_
7. TREES FOR LAWNS AND STREETS
_List of hardy deciduous trees for the North_
_Non-coniferous trees for the South_
8. CONIFEROUS EVERGREEN SHRUBS AND TREES
_List of shrubby conifers_
_Arboreous conifers_
_Conifers for the South_
9. WINDOW-GARDENS
_The window-box for outside effect_
_The inside window-garden, or “house plants”_
_Bulbs in the window-garden_
_Watering house plants_
_Hanging baskets_
_Aquarium_
CHAPTER VIII. THE GROWING OF THE ORNAMENTAL PLANTS—INSTRUCTIONS OF
PARTICULAR KINDS
Abutilons; agapanthus; alstremeria; amaryllis; anemone; aralia;
araucaria; auricula; azaleas; begonias; cactus; caladium; calceolaria;
calla; camellias; cannas; carnations; century plants; chrysanthemums;
cineraria; clematis; coleus; crocus; croton; cyclamen; dahlia; ferns;
freesia; fuchsia; geranium; gladiolus; gloxinia; grevillea; hollyhocks;
hyacinths; iris; lily; lily-of-the-valley; mignonette; moon-flowers;
narcissus; oleander; oxalis; palms; pandanus; pansy; pelargonium;
peony; phlox; primulas; rhododendrons; rose; smilax; stocks; sweet pea;
swainsona; tuberose; tulips; violet; wax plant.
CHAPTER IX. THE GROWING OF THE FRUIT PLANTS
_Dwarf fruit-trees_
_Age and size of trees_
_Pruning_
_Thinning the fruit_
_Washing and scrubbing the trees_
_Gathering and keeping fruit_
Almond; apples; apricot; blackberry; cherry; cranberry; currant;
dewberry; fig; gooseberry; grape; mulberry; nuts; orange; peach; pear;
plum; quince; raspberry; strawberry;
CHAPTER X. THE GROWING OF THE VEGETABLE PLANTS
_Vegetables for six_
_The classes of vegetables_
_The culture of the leading vegetables_
Asparagus; artichoke; artichoke; Jerusalem; bean; beet; broccoli;
brussels sprouts; cabbage; carrot; cauliflower; celeriac; celery;
chard; chicory; chervil; chives; collards; corn salad; corn; cress;
cucumber; dandelion; egg-plant; endive; garlic; horseradish; kale;
kohlrabi; leek; lettuce; mushroom; mustard; muskmelon; okra; onion;
parsley; parsnip; pea; pepper; potato; radish; rhubarb; salsify;
sea-kale; sorrel; spearmint; spinach; squash; sweet-potato; tomato;
turnips and rutabagas; watermelon.
CHAPTER XI. SEASONAL REMINDERS
For the North
For the South
INDEX
LIST OF PLATES
PLATE I. The open center.
PLATE II. The plan of the place.
PLATE III. Open-center treatment in a semi-tropical country.
PLATE IV. Subtropical bedding against a building. Caladiums, cannas,
abutilons, permanent rhododendrons, and other large stuff, with
tuberous begonias and balsams between.
PLATE V. A subtropical bed. Center of cannas, with border of
_Pennisetum longistylum_ (a grass) started in late February or early
March.
PLATE VI. A tree that gives character to a place.
PLATE VII. Bedding with palms. If a bricked-up pit is made about the
porch, pot palms may be plunged in it in spring and tub conifers in
winter; and fall bulbs in tin cans (so that the receptacles will not
split with frost) may be plunged among the evergreens.
PLATE VIII. A well-planted entrance. Common trees and bushes, with
Boston ivy. on the post, and _Berberis Thunbergii_ in front.
PLATE IX. A rocky bank covered with permanent informal planting.
PLATE X. A shallow lawn pond, containing water-lilies, variegated sweet
flag, iris, and subtropical bedding at the rear; fountain covered with
parrot’s feather (_Myriophyllum proserpinacoides_).
PLATE XI. A back yard with summer house, and gardens beyond.
PLATE XII. A back yard with heavy flower-garden planting.
PLATE XIII. The pageant of summer. Gardens of C.W. Dowdeswell, England,
from a painting by Miss Parsons.
PLATE XIV. Virginia creeper screen, on an old fence, with wall-flowers
and hollyhocks in front.
PLATE XV. Scuppernong grape, the arbor vine of the South. This plate
shows the noted scuppernongs on Roanoke Island, of which the origin is
unknown, but which were of great size more than one hundred years ago.
PLATE XVI. A flower-garden of China asters, with border of one of the
dusty millers (_Centaurea_).
PLATE XVII. The peony. One of the most steadfast of garden flowers.
PLATE XVIII. Cornflower or bachelor’s button. _Centaurea Cyanus_.
PLATE XIX. Pyracantha in fruit. One of the best ornamental-fruited
plants for the middle and milder latitudes.
PLATE XX. A simple but effective window-box, containing geraniums,
petunias, verbenas, heliotrope, and vines.
PLATE XXI. The king of fruits. Newtown as grown in the Pacific country.
PLATE XXII. Wall-training of a pear tree.
PLATE XXIII. Cherry currant.
PLATE XXIV. Golden Bantam sweet corn.
PLATE XXV. The garden radish, grown in fall, of the usual spring sorts.
EXPLANATION
It has been my desire to reconstruct the two books, “Garden-Making” and
“Practical Garden-Book”; but inasmuch as these books have found a
constituency in their present form, it has seemed best to let them
stand as they are and to continue their publication as long as the
demand maintains itself, and to prepare a new work on gardening. This
new work I now offer as “A Manual of Gardening.” It is a combination
and revision of the main parts of the other two books, together with
much new material and the results of the experience of ten added years.
A book of this kind cannot be drawn wholly from one’s own practice,
unless it is designed to have a very restricted and local application.
Many of the best suggestions in such a book will have come from
correspondents, questioners, and those who enjoy talking about gardens;
and my situation has been such that these communications have come to
me freely. I have always tried, however, to test all such suggestions
by experience and to make them my own before offering them to my
reader. I must express my special obligation to those persons who
collaborated in the preparation of the other two books, and whose
contributions have been freely used in this one: to C.E. Hunn, a
gardener of long experience; Professor Ernest Walker, reared as a
commercial florist; Professor L.R. Taft and Professor F.A. Waugh, well
known for their studies and writings in horticultural subjects.
In making this book, I have had constantly in mind the home-maker
himself or herself rather than the professional gardener. It is of the
greatest importance that we attach many persons to the land; and I am
convinced that an interest in gardening will naturally take the place
of many desires that are much more difficult to gratify, and that lie
beyond the reach of the average man or woman.
It has been my good fortune to have seen amateur and commercial
gardening in all parts of the United States, and I have tried to
express something of this generality in the book; yet my experience, as
well as that of my original collaborators, is of the northeastern
states, and the book is therefore necessarily written from this region
as a base. One gardening book cannot be made to apply in its practice
in all parts of the United States and Canada unless its instructions
are so general as to be practically useless; but the principles and
points of view may have wider application. While I have tried to give
only the soundest and most tested advice, I cannot hope to have escaped
errors and shortcomings, and I shall be grateful to my reader if he
will advise me of mistakes or faults that he may discover. I shall
expect to use such information in the making of subsequent editions.
Of course an author cannot hold himself responsible for failures that
his reader may suffer. The statements in a book of this kind are in the
nature of advice, and it may or it may not apply in particular
conditions, and the success or failure is the result mostly of the
judgment and carefulness of the operator. I hope that no reader of a
gardening book will ever conceive the idea that reading a book and
following it literally will make him a gardener. He must always assume
his own risks, and this will be the first step in his personal
progress.
I should explain that the botanical nomenclature of this book is that
of the “Cyclopedia of American Horticulture,” unless otherwise stated.
The exceptions are the “trade names,” or those used by nurserymen and
seedsmen in the sale of their stock.
I should further explain the reason for omitting ligatures and using
such words as peony, spirea, dracena, cobea. As technical Latin
formularies, the compounds must of course be retained, as in _Pæonia
officinalis_, _Spiræa Thunbergi_, _Dracæna fragrans_, _Cobœa scandens_;
but as Anglicized words of common speech it is time to follow the
custom of general literature, in which the combinations æ and œ have
disappeared. This simplification was begun in the “Cyclopedia of
American Horticulture” and has been continued in other writings.
L. H. BAILEY.
ITHACA, NEW YORK,
January 20, 1910.
CHAPTER I
THE POINT OF VIEW
I. The open center. I. The open center.
Wherever there is soil, plants grow and produce their kind, and all
plants are interesting; when a person makes a choice as to what plants
he shall grow in any given place, he becomes a gardener or a farmer;
and if the conditions are such that he cannot make a choice, he may
adopt the plants that grow there by nature, and by making the most of
them may still be a gardener or a farmer in some degree.
Every family, therefore, may have a garden. If there is not a foot of
land, there are porches or windows. Wherever there is sunlight, plants
may be made to grow; and one plant in a tin-can may be a more helpful
and inspiring garden to some mind than a whole acre of lawn and flowers
may be to another.
The satisfaction of a garden does not depend on the area, nor, happily,
on the cost or rarity of the plants. It depends on the temper of the
person. One must first seek to love plants and nature, and then to
cultivate the happy peace of mind that is satisfied with little.
In the vast majority of cases a person will be happier if he has no
rigid and arbitrary notions, for gardens are moodish, particularly with
the novice. If plants grow and thrive, he should be happy; and if the
plants that thrive chance not to be the ones that he planted, they are
plants nevertheless, and nature is satisfied with them.
We are wont to covet the things that we cannot have; but we are happier
when we love the things that grow because they must. A patch of lusty
pigweeds, growing and crowding in luxuriant abandon, may be a better
and more worthy object of affection than a bed of coleuses in which
every spark of life and spirit and individuality has been sheared out
and suppressed. The man who worries morning and night about the
dandelions in the lawn will find great relief in loving the dandelions.
Each blossom is worth more than a gold coin, as it shines in the
exuberant sunlight of the growing spring, and attracts the insects to
its bosom. Little children like the dandelions: why may not we? Love
the things nearest at hand; and love intensely. If I were to write a
motto over the gate of a garden, I should choose the remark that
Socrates is said to have made as he saw the luxuries in the market,
“How much there is in the world that I do not want!”
I verily believe that this paragraph I have just written is worth more
than all the advice with which I intend to cram the succeeding pages,
notwithstanding the fact that I have most assiduously extracted this
advice from various worthy but, happily, long-forgotten authors.
Happiness is a quality of a person, not of a plant or a garden; and the
anticipation of joy in the writing of a book may be the reason why so
many books on garden-making have been written. Of course, all these
books have been good and useful. It would be ungrateful, at the least,
for the present writer to say otherwise; but books grow old, and the
advice becomes too familiar. The sentences need to be transposed and
the order of the chapters varied, now and then, or interest lags. Or,
to speak plainly, a new book of advice on handicraft is needed in every
decade, or perhaps oftener in these days of many publishers. There has
been a long and worthy procession of these handbooks,—Gardiner &
Hepburn, M’Mahon, Cobbett—original, pungent, versatile
Cobbett!—Fessenden, Squibb, Bridgeman, Sayers, Buist, and a dozen more,
each one a little richer because the others had been written. But even
the fact that all books pass into oblivion does not deter another hand
from making still another venture.
I expect, then, that every person who reads this book will make a
garden, or will try to make one; but if only tares grow where roses are
desired, I must remind the reader that at the outset I advised
pigweeds. The book, therefore, will suit everybody,—the experienced
gardener, because it will be a repetition of what he already knows; and
the novice, because it will apply as well to a garden of burdocks as of
onions.
[Illustration: Fig. 1. The ornamental burdock]
_What a garden is_.
A garden is the personal part of an estate, the area that is most
intimately associated with the private life of the home. Originally,
the garden was the area inside the inclosure or lines of fortification,
in distinction from the unprotected area or fields that lay beyond; and
this latter area was the particular domain of agriculture. This book
understands the garden to be that part of the personal or home premises
devoted to ornament, and to the growing of vegetables and fruits. The
garden, therefore, is an ill-defined demesne; but the reader must not
make the mistake of defining it by dimensions, for one may have a
garden in a flower-pot or on a thousand acres. In other words, this
book declares that every bit of land that is not used for buildings,
walks, drives, and fences, should be planted. What we shall
plant—whether sward, lilacs, thistles, cabbages, pears, chrysanthemums,
or tomatoes—we shall talk about as we proceed.
The only way to keep land perfectly unproductive is to keep it moving.
The moment the owner lets it alone, the planting has begun. In my own
garden, this first planting is of pigweeds. These may be followed, the
next year, by ragweeds, then by docks and thistles, with here and there
a start of clover and grass; and it all ends in June-grass and
dandelions.
Nature does not allow the land to remain bare and idle. Even the banks
where plaster and lath were dumped two or three years ago are now
luxuriant with burdocks and sweet clover; and yet persons who pass
those dumps every day say that they can grow nothing in their own yard
because the soil is so poor! Yet I venture that those same persons
furnish most of the pigweed seed that I use on my garden.
The lesson is that there is no soil—where a house would be built—so
poor that something worth while cannot be grown on it. If burdocks will
grow, something else will grow; or if nothing else will grow, then I
prefer burdocks to sand and rubbish.
The burdock is one of the most striking and decorative of plants, and a
good piece of it against a building or on a rough bank is just as
useful as many plants that cost money and are difficult to grow. I had
a good clump of burdock under my study window, and it was a great
comfort; but the man would persist in wanting to cut it down when he
mowed the lawn. When I remonstrated, he declared that it was nothing
but burdock; but I insisted that, so far from being burdock, it was
really Lappa major, since which time the plant and its offspring have
enjoyed his utmost respect. And I find that most of my friends reserve
their appreciation of a plant until they have learned its name and its
family connections.
The dump-place that I mentioned has a surface area of nearly one
hundred and fifty square feet, and I find that it has grown over two
hundred good plants of one kind or another this year. This is more than
my gardener accomplished on an equal area, with manure and water and a
man to help. The difference was that the plants on the dump wanted to
grow, and the imported plants in the garden did not want to grow. It
was the difference between a willing horse and a balky horse. If a
person wants to show his skill, he may choose the balky plant; but if
he wants fun and comfort in gardening, he would better choose the
willing one.
I have never been able to find out when the burdocks and mustard were
planted on the dump; and I am sure that they were never hoed or
watered. Nature practices a wonderfully rigid economy. For nearly half
the summer she even refused rain to the plants, but still they thrived;
yet I staid home from a vacation one summer that I might keep my plants
from dying. I have since learned that if the plants in my hardy borders
cannot take care of themselves for a time, they are little comfort to
me.
The joy of garden-making lies in the mental attitude and in the
sentiments.