Excerpt from Cyclopedia of American Horticulture, Vol. 4 of 4: Comprising Suggestions for Cultivation of Horticultural Plants, Descriptions of the Species of Fruits, Vegetables, Flowers and Ornamental Plants Sold in the United States and Canada, Together With Geographical and Biographical Sketches
But these volumes were isolated; they picked up the work piece by piece. An inventory of the whole field, critically and laboriously made, was needed before mere annals of yearly progress could signify much. We needed to know our status; thereafter chronicles would have a meaning.
From 1893, attention was given to the larger and comprehensive effort. A garden herbarium had to be made, for there was none in the country. The first plant had been put into this herbarium in 1889; it was a mere sprig of the greenhouse shrub Boronia megastigma. There are difficulties in making a garden herbarium: there are no professional collectors and one cannot buy specimens; many cultivated plants are too valuable to allow of specimens to be made. This herbarium now has more than 12,000 mounted specimens. Although small, nevertheless it has been invaluable. If it does not show nearly all the species, it shows the range of variation in some, and thereby suggests what may take place in all. It also shows what is actually cultivated under a given name, whether that name be correct or not.
Trial excursions were made into the evolution of various perplexed garden plants. Some of these essays have been published. Out of these efforts grew the volume, "Sketch of the Evolution of Our Native Fruits." The study of garden plants is a different subject from the study of wild plants. Mere descriptions are ofteu of little value. The plant may have been bred away from the description within a decade. Specific descriptions of many of the common garden plants do not exist in books : the plants are not species in the book sense.
American horticultural books must be collected, for the comprehensive work, if it came, must contain American advice. One must know the range of New World experience and the occidental point of view. It has been the misfortune of many American writings that they have drawn too heavily from the experience of the Old World. Once this was necessary, but now it is time to break away. Fifty authors have written on viticulture in America, yet scarcely one has caught the spirit of the American grape-growing. Nearly twenty years of collecting by the Editor has brought together the completest library of American horticultural books.
The details entering into any comprehensive cyclopedia of horticulture are astonishing in number and variety. Consider some of the items: More than 10,000 species of plants in cultivation; almost every important species phenomenally variable, sometimes running into thousands of forms; every species requiring its own soil and treatment, and sometimes even minor varieties differing in these requirements; limitless differences iu soils and climates in our great domain, every difference modifying the plants or their requirements; a different ideal in plant-growing and plant-breediug iu the mind of every good plant-grower; as many different kinds of experience as there are men; many of these men not facile with the pen, although full of wholesome fact and experience; the species described iu books which deal with the four corners of the earth; very few botanists who have given much attention to the domestic flora.
It was desired that the Cyclopedia be new-brand-new from start to finish. The illustrations were to be newly made; the cultural suggestions written directly for the occasion from American experience, and ofteu presented from more than one point oi view; few of the precedents of former cyclopedias to be followed; all matters to be worked up by experts and from sources as nearly as possible original. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге Cyclopedia of American Horticulture, Vol. 4 of 4 (L. H. Bailey)