Horticulture

1951 — pp. xvi, 246 + Plus color Frontis and numerous full page color photographs. Map endpapers. ** File copy from the McFarland Layout Department of J. Horace McFarland Company. 8vo. Original full cloth binding. Hardbound. First edition. 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. This book covers gardening, from Texas to Florida and Virginia and including Arkansas, Tennessee, Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana. It includes garden history, gardening by season, blooms all year round, color in the garden, roses, boxwood, azaleas, camellias, etc, fruit, vegetables, with detailed lists of plants for different conditions. Wonderful McFarland color photographs of southern gardens. Very nice copy. PLANTS W132