Fleurs

1933 — 320p. Each page illustrated with lovely color photographs. ** J. Horace McFarland Company's bookplate from their Art Department. Tall 8vo. Original full cloth binding, soiled. Hardbound. 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. First edition. Nice copy illustrating in color popular flowers grown in the 1930's. One of the most famous books to use McFarland's photographs. PLANTS W133