Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) A Practical Guide to the Making of Home Grounds and the Growing of Flowers, Fruits, and Vegetables for Home Use — Background and Themes

CHAPTER I. THE POINT OF VIEW

CHAPTER II. THE GENERAL PLAN OR THEORY OF THE PLACE

_The plan of the grounds_

_The picture in the landscape_

_The planting is part of the design or picture_

_The flower-growing should be part of the design_

Defects in flower-growing

The old-fashioned garden

Contents of the flower-borders

_The value of plants may lie in foliage and form rather than in bloom_

_Various specific examples_

CHAPTER III. EXECUTION OF SOME OF THE LANDSCAPE FEATURES

The question of drainage, curbing, and gutters

When and how to sow the seed

A combination of sodding and seeding

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_

Trowels and their kind

CHAPTER V. THE HANDLING OF THE PLANTS

_Propagating by cuttings_

Dormant stem-cuttings

_Transplanting young seedlings_

_Transplanting established plants and trees_

Making the rows straight

Cutting-back; filling

Removing very large trees

_Winter protection of plants_

_Tree surgery and protection_

Repairing street trees

_The grafting of plants_

_Keeping records of the plantation_

_The storing of fruits and vegetables_

_The forcing of plants_

Management of hotbeds

CHAPTER VI. PROTECTING PLANTS FROM THINGS THAT PREY ON THEM

_Soaking tubers and seeds_

_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_

Plants for subtropical effects

_Aquatic and bog plants_

_Rockeries and alpine plants_

1. PLANTS FOR CARPET-BEDS

_Lists for carpet-beds_

_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_

_List of outdoor fall-planted bulbs for the North_

_List of shrubbery plants for the North_

_Shrubs for the South_

_Annual herbaceous climbers_

_Perennial herbaceous climbers_

_Woody perennial climbers_

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_

_Conifers for the South_

_The window-box for outside effect_

_The inside window-garden, or “house plants”_

_Bulbs in the window-garden_

_Watering house plants_

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

_Age and size of trees_

_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

_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

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.

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.

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.

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.

CHAPTER II THE GENERAL PLAN OR THEORY OF THE PLACE

Having now discussed the most essential elements of gardening, we may give attention to such minor features as the actual way in which a satisfying garden is to be planned and executed.

Speaking broadly, a person will get from a garden what he puts into it; and it is of the first importance, therefore, that a clear conception of the work be formulated at the outset. I do not mean to say that the garden will always turn out what it was desired that it should be; but the failure to turn out properly is usually some fault in the first plan or some neglect in execution.

Sometimes the disappointment in an ornamental garden is a result of confusion of ideas as to what a garden is for. One of my friends was greatly disappointed on returning to his garden early in September to find that it was not so full and floriferous as when he left it in July. He had not learned the simple lesson that even a flower-garden should exhibit the natural progress of the season. If the garden begins to show ragged places and to decline in late August or early September, it is what occurs in all surrounding vegetation. The year is maturing. The garden ought to express the feeling of the different months. The failing leaves and expended plants are therefore to be looked on, to some extent at least, as the natural order and destiny of a good garden.