Horticulture

1951 — 24p. Illustrated with cartoon like drawings. Front and rear pages foxed. Oblong 8vo. Original full paper binding illustrated with a cartoon drawing on front cover. Walter Huber (1886-1961) Sports Cartoonist for Philadelphia Inquirer and Bulletin and some Washington, D.C. newspapers, as well as the political cartoonist for the Harrisburg Patriot newspaper. He also served as the Art Director for J. Horace McFarland Co. This copy was used in the printing office of J. Horace McFarland (1859-1948). McFarland was one of the first Americans to sound the call for environmental and scenic protection. In 1878, at age nineteen, McFarland opened his printing business and began to publish gardening and seed catalogs. Realizing that woodcuts did not adequately represent the plants, he started to explore the use of photography. By 1894, he was experimenting with color photography and his company had become America's premier publisher of gardening catalogs, with what may have been the first color photographs produced in the US. The success of his publishing business provided McFarland with wealth and security, and freed him to engage extensively in the philanthropy and civic activism he loved. He was recognized as a master gardener whose books and photographs on roses, trees and other subjects were famous across the United States. He wrote more than a dozen books on roses and made the American Rose Society a world-renowned institution. As president, he established a method of rose identification and registration that is still in use today. He was widely known as "Mr. Rose" and was a founder and president of the American Rose Society, which had an international impact on the propagation of roses. His home and garden in the Bellevue Park section of Harrisburg was an internationally famous testing ground for hundreds of new plant species. It contained 5,000 plants including varieties of roses. Nice copy of an ephemeral book. SCARCE. PLANTS W132