Excerpt from California Garden-Flowers, Shrubs, Trees and Vines: Being Mainly Suggestions for Working Amateurs
In the hope of assisting others to attain greater joy and satisfaction in the common growing of flowers, which he has himself courted as an avocation from other weightier horticultural affairs for more than thirty-five years, the writer gathers suggestions from his own experience and enriches them with his observation and study of the work of others who have also enjoyed the advantage of pursuing their garden activities in California.
Flower-growing includes a wide range of activity. On the one hand it may lay hold upon a wealth of natural plant-beauty and behavior and win for its votary, in the public eye, the semblance of a botanist. On the other hand flower-growing may become so thoroughly engrossed with artificial standards of size, variegation and floriferousness and use so freely the agencies and materials which promote them, that its successful operator may almost seem to be a manufacturer.
Both of these lofty extremes of flower-growing are equally beyond the reach of this writer. He has never seen a "wild-garden" which gave him any of the joy of a ramble in the woods or on the hillsides or meadows. Even the same plants jumbled together could never suggest to him that a corner of a back yard had the slightest approach to wildness. The plants lack natural pose, or a corner of the fence intrudes, or a domestic cat jumps out of the aquilegias or something else always discloses deus ex machina. For this reason, although free use of California native plants will be emphasized, the reader will find herein no suggestion of a "wild-garden," nor of flowers grown in a wild way, nor of a botanist with his notebook and tinware - nor of anything else which the ordinary reader might mistake for science of any kind.
And the same attitude will be observed toward the other extreme of flower-growing - the manufacturing art. No attempt will be made to describe the way "florist flowers" are grown. In this case the writer has no prejudice. He has no objection to blossoms of colossal size nor to promotion of variation or abundance by heat, special fertilizers and fine arts of handling, which are the business capital of the florist. Nor does he object to intensive culture in the open air, such as trenching, double trenching, etc., by which a man is ordered to make deeper excavations for a bulb or a root, than were required for the foundations of his cottage.
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