A Practical Treatise of How to Grow Flowers, Fruits, Vegetables, Shrubbery, Evergreens (Paperback)

Paperback. Charles H. Tritschler and W. D. Buchanan published this small, dollar-priced treatise in Nashville in 1910, written in their own statement for the busy city man with a fifty-foot square of beds and the suburbanite with a few acres of leisure ground. The book is organised season by season and crop by crop - from Abronia through Zinnia, from Apples through Watermelons, with separate parts on shrubbery, evergreens, ornamental and shade trees, and the pests and diseases that attack all of them. Behind the prose stands forty years' experience in the trade and, almost certainly, a working middle-Tennessee nursery for which the book served double duty as primer and quiet catalogue. The voice is generous, concrete, and unembarrassed about its remedies: Paris green for the cutworm, Bordeaux mixture for the fungus, fresh cow manure tied in a sack for the liquid feed. It is the American horticulture of the moment just before Liberty Hyde Bailey's encyclopaedic synthesis and a half-century before Rachel Carson reorganised the entire chemical apparatus from underneath. A Practical Treatise of How to Grow Flowers, Fruits, Vegetables, Shrubbery, Evergreens, Shade Trees, Ornamental Trees, Plant Pests, Diseases and Remedies is exactly the kind of book its title page advertises - a one-dollar, McQuiddy-printed Nashville manual of about a hundred and seventy pages, signed by two authors with the working confidence of long practitioners, and arranged so that an amateur can find a plant by its common name and learn in a few sentences when to sow it, what soil it wants, when to transplant, and what will eat it if he does not pay attention. The introductory paragraphs state the design with no varnish: 'This is not an encyclopedia of plants arranged for the perusal of the botanist, nor a study of agriculture, floriculture, pomology, or arboriculture, but just a simple, comprehensive, plain talk about how to successfully grow seeds and plants.' What follows honours the promise. The world the book came from is the American middle-South of 1910 - Nashville, Tennessee, the McQuiddy presses of the Gospel Advocate firm, and a regional nursery trade whose customers were small farmers, suburban householders, and the residents of the new streetcar neighbourhoods that ringed every Southern city by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. The two authors, Charles H. Tritschler and W. D. Buchanan, write as men with skin in the game. The introductory note speaks of 'over forty years of varied experience in floriculture'; the apple chapter recommends consulting the local nurseryman on variety selection, an instruction that reads more naturally if the book's authors expect to be that nurseryman. Treatises of this type, common in American horticulture from the 1880s through the 1920s, frequently doubled as soft catalogues for the firms that issued them. The text is innocent of any advertising, but its centre of gravity is the kind of working knowledge a nurseryman would want a customer to share. What this edition transmits to a present-day reader is the texture of garden practice at a precise moment in the chemical history of American horticulture. Tritschler and Buchanan write before the Federal Insecticide Act of 1910 had any practical bite on home application, decades before the 1947 federal pesticide statute, and a full half-century before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) rebuilt the framework in which the same problems are now thought about. Their cutworm remedy is corn meal moistened with Paris green; their fungus standard is Bordeaux mixture at two pounds of copper sulphate to two pounds of fresh lime in twenty-five gallons of water; their liquid feed is a coarse sack of fresh cow manure suspended in a barrel. They give the recipes without hedging because the recipes were, in 1910, the consensus of the trade. Method of thi Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…