maintains itself, and to prepare a new work on gardening. This new work
I now offer as "A Manual of Gardening." It is a combination and revision
of the main parts of the other two books, together with much new
material and the results of the experience of ten added years.

A book of this kind cannot be drawn wholly from one's own practice,
unless it is designed to have a very restricted and local application.
Many of the best suggestions in such a book will have come from
correspondents, questioners, and those who enjoy talking about gardens;
and my situation has been such that these communications have come to me
freely. I have always tried, however, to test all such suggestions by
experience and to make them my own before offering them to my reader. I
must express my special obligation to those persons who collaborated in
the preparation of the other two books, and whose contributions have
been freely used in this one: to C.E. Hunn, a gardener of long
experience; Professor Ernest Walker, reared as a commercial florist;
Professor L.R. Taft and Professor F.A. Waugh, well known for their
studies and writings in horticultural subjects.

In making this book, I have had constantly in mind the home-maker
himself or herself rather than the professional gardener. It is of the
greatest importance that we attach many persons to the land; and I am
convinced that an interest in gardening will naturally take the place of
many desires that are much more difficult to gratify, and that lie
beyond the reach of the average man or woman.

It has been my good fortune to have seen amateur and commercial
gardening in all parts of the United States, and I have tried to express
something of this generality in the book; yet my experience, as well as
that of my original collaborators, is of the northeastern states, and