Manual of Gardening

Manual of Gardening

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Title: Manual of Gardening (Second Edition)
Author: L. H. Bailey
Release Date: December, 2005 [EBook #9550] [This file was first posted on October 8,
2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: iso-8859-1
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MANUAL OF GARDENING
A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO THE MAKING OF HOME GROUNDS AND THE
GROWING OF FLOWERS, FRUITS, AND VEGETABLES FOR HOME USE
SECOND EDITION
BY L. H. BAILEY
1910

[Illustration: I. The open center.]

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