Horticulture

1841 · réf. 018520 — London: Longman Orme Brown Green and Longmans 1841. First edition. Large octavo illustrated with seven engraved plates and and a engraved portrait frontispiece pp xii 379 rather used and thumbed internally and becoming rather weak the front and rear hinges very cracked and loose the title page detached original cloth rather worn and blotched. The Syon Gardens copy with their stamps throughout. RARE. The extensive sketch of his life was written by his daughter. Knight was the brother of Payne Knight and the second President of the Royal Horticultural Society. Attention was first called to his work in 1795 by the publication of the results of his research into the propagation of fruit trees and the diseases prevalent among them. He used 10000 acres 4000 ha of land he inherited to conduct breeding of plants including strawberries cabbages and peas and built an extensive greenhouse. Knight performed basic physiological experiments on plants which work had been performed before only rarely. He elucidated the effects of gravity on seedlings and how decay in fruit trees was passed on by grafting. In many respects his work looked back to that of Rev. Stephen Hales. His goals were always strictly practical aiming to improve useful food plants by breeding for better qualities. The Downton strawberry was the ancestor of most important modern strawberries until recent times. It is not widely known that he studied variation in peas and found many of the same results as Mendel but he failed to make the same imaginative leap about how these changes took place. Knight intentionally shut himself off from outside scientific influences. He refused to read anyone else's scientific papers until Sir Joseph Banks with whom he had a voluminous correspondence persuaded him to do so. First Edition. Cloth. Fair. Longman, Orme, Brown, Green and Longmans Hardcover