The Liberty Hyde Bailey Gardener's Companion: Essential Writings
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The Liberty Hyde Bailey Gardener's Companion: Essential Writings
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Overview
"Every family can have a garden." -Liberty Hyde Bailey
Finally, the best and most accessible garden writings of perhaps the most influential literary gardener of the twentieth century have been brought together in one book. Philosopher, poet, naturist, educator, agrarian, scientist, and garden-lover par excellence Liberty Hyde Bailey built a reputation as the Father of Modern Horticulture and evangelist for what he called the "garden-sentiment"—the desire to raise plants from the good earth for the sheer joy of it and for the love of the plants themselves. Bailey's perennial call to all of us to get outside and get our hands dirty, old or young, green thumb or no, is just as fresh and stirring today as then.
Full of timeless wit and grace, The Liberty Hyde Bailey Gardener's Companion collects essays and poems from Bailey's many books on gardening, as well as from newspapers and magazines from the era. Whether you've been gardening for decades or are searching for your first inspiration, Bailey's words will make an ideal companion on your journey.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781501740282 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Cornell University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/15/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
John Stempien teaches history in Lowell, Michigan, and served as the first director of the Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum from 2006–2012.
John Linstrom is a writer and doctoral candidate in English. He edited the centennial edition of Bailey's The Holy Earth.
Liberty Hyde Bailey (1858–1954) grew up on a farm in Michigan and went on to become Dean of the College of Agriculture at Cornell University, Chair of the Country Life Commission under President Theodore Roosevelt, and the "Father of Modern Horticulture." Simultaneously horticultural scientist and literary naturist, he authored more than seventy books, published thousands of articles, and founded or oversaw countless organizations.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Garden in the Mind
Like the love of music, books and pictures, the love of gardens comes with culture and leisure and with the ripening of the home life. The love of gardens, as of every other beautiful and refining thing, must increase to the end of time. More and more must the sympathies enlarge. There must be more points of contact with the world. Life ever becomes richer. Gardening is more than the growing of plants: it is the expression of desire.
General Advice
Every family can have a garden. If there is not a foot of land, there are porches or windows. Wherever there is sunlight, plants may be made to grow; and one plant in a tin can may be a more helpful and inspiring garden to some mind than a whole acre of lawn and flowers may be to another. The satisfaction of a garden does not depend upon the area, nor, happily, upon the cost or rarity of the plants. It depends upon the temper of the person. One must first seek to love plants and nature, and then to cultivate that happy peace of mind which is satisfied with little. He will be happier if he has no rigid and arbitrary ideals, for gardens are coquettish, particularly with the novice. If plants grow and thrive, he should be happy; and if the plants which thrive chance not to be the ones which he planted, they are plants nevertheless, and nature is satisfied with them. We are apt to covet the things which we cannot have; but we are happier when we love the things which grow because they must. A patch of lusty pigweeds, growing and crowding in luxuriant abandon, may be a better and more worthy object of affection than a bed of coleuses in which every spark of life and spirit and individuality has been sheared out and suppressed. The man who worries morning and night about the dandelions in the lawn will find great relief in loving the dandelions. Each blossom is worth more than a gold coin, as it shimmers in the exuberant sunlight of the growing spring, and attracts the bees to its bosom. Little children love the dandelions: why may not we? Love the things nearest at hand; and love intensely. If I were to write a motto over the gate of a garden, I should choose the remark which Socrates made as he saw the luxuries in the market, "How much there is in the world that I do not want!" I verily believe that this paragraph which I have just written is worth more than all the advice with which I intend to cram the succeeding pages, notwithstanding the fact that I have most assiduously extracted this advice from various worthy but, happily, long-forgotten authors. Happiness is a quality of a person, not of a plant or a garden; and the anticipation of joy in the writing of a book may be the reason why so many books on garden-making have been written. Of course, all these books have been good and useful. It would be ungrateful, at the least, for the present writer to say otherwise; but books grow old, and the advice becomes too familiar. The sentences need to be transposed and the order of the chapters varied, now and then, or interest lags. Or, to speak plainly, a new book of advice upon handicraft is needed in every decade. There has been a long and worthy procession of these handbooks, — Gardiner & Hepburn, M'Mahon, Cobbett — original, pungent, ubiquitous Cobbett! — Fessenden, Bridgeman, Sayers, Buist, and a dozen more, each one a little richer because the others had been written. But even the fact that these books pass into oblivion does not deter another hand from making still another venture!
I expect, then, that every person who reads this book will make a garden, or will try to make one; but if only tares grow where roses are desired, I must remind the reader that at the outset I advised pigweeds. The book, therefore, will suit everybody, — the experienced gardener, because it will be an echo of what he already knows; and the novice, because it will apply as well to a garden of burdocks as of onions.
A garden is the personal part of an estate, that area which is most intimately associated with the private life of the home. Originally, the garden was the area inside the enclosure or lines of fortification, in distinction to the unprotected area or fields which lay beyond; and this latter area was the particular domain of agriculture. This book understands the garden to be that part of the premises which is devoted to ornament, and to the growing of vegetables and fruits either for the home consumption or for market. The garden is, therefore, an ill-defined demesne; but the reader must not make the mistake of defining it by dimensions, for one may have a garden in a flower-pot or on a thousand acres. In other words, this book believes that every bit of land which is not used for buildings, walks, drives and fences, should be planted. What we shall plant, — whether sward, lilacs, thistles, cabbages, pears, chrysanthemums or tomatoes, — we shall talk about as we proceed.
The only way to keep land perfectly unproductive is to keep it moving. The moment the owner lets it alone, the planting has begun. In my own garden, this first planting is of pigweeds. These are usually followed, the next year, by ragweeds, then by docks and thistles, with here and there a start of clover and grass; and it all ends in June-grass and dandelions. Nature does not allow the land to remain bare and idle. Even the bank where plaster and lath were dumped two years ago is now luxuriant with burdocks and sweet clover; and yet people who pass that dump every day say that they can grow nothing in their own yard because the soil is so poor! Yet, I venture that those same persons furnish most of the pigweed seed which I use on my garden.
The lesson is that there is no soil, — where a house would be built, — so poor that something cannot be grown. If burdocks will grow, something else will grow; or if nothing else will grow, then I prefer burdocks to sand and rubbish. The burdock is one of the most striking and decorative of plants, and a good piece of it against a building or on a rough bank is just as useful as some plant which costs money and is difficult to grow. I had a good clump of it under my study window, and it was a great comfort, but the man would persist in cutting it down when he mowed the lawn. When I remonstrated, he declared that it was nothing but burdock; but I insisted that, so far from being burdock, it was really Lappa major, since which time the plant has enjoyed his utmost respect. And I find that most of my friends reserve their appreciation of a plant until they have learned its name and connections.
The dump-heap which I mentioned has a surface area of nearly one-hundred and fifty square feet, and I find that it has grown over two hundred good plants of one kind or another this year. This is more than my gardener accomplished on an equal area, with manure and water and a man to help. The difference was that the plants on the dump wanted to grow, and the imported plants in the garden did not want to grow. It was the difference between a willing horse and a balky one. If a person wants to show his skill, he may choose the balky plant: but if he wants fun and comfort in gardening, he had better choose the willing one.
I have never been able to find out when the burdocks and mustard were planted on the dump; and I am sure that they were never hoed or watered. Nature practices a wonderfully rigid economy. For nearly half the summer she even refused rain to the plants, but still they thrived; yet I staid home from a vacation one summer that I might keep my plants from dying. I have since learned that if the plants in my borders cannot take care of themselves for a few weeks, they are little comfort to me.
To One Who Hath No Garden
There are two parts to gardening, — the growing of the plants in the soil, and the garden in the mind. The desire to have a garden comes first; then comes the season of planning, the pleasant discussion of the kinds, the tools, the construction of hotbed and frame, and the layout worked over and over again until the area, the desired products, and the purse are all accommodated and made to fit; finally comes the putting of the plan into execution.
I know persons who are musicians and yet have no musical instruments. Some of them can perform on instruments and some of them cannot. If they are performers, they miss the instruments more. Do not most of us, with high taste for music, secure our satisfaction in it from those more fortunate or more skillful than we? I know poets who do not write poetry, artists who do not paint, architects who do not build. I know gardeners who do not garden. It is not for me to depreciate the joy and value of a garden that one makes in the good earth with one's own hand; yet the garden is an appreciation. It is an appreciation of activity, of color, of form, of ground smells, of wind and rain and sun, of the day and the night, of the things that grow. Good critics of gardens, good lovers of gardens, may yet not be good gardeners; and good growers may not be deep appreciators of gardens.
To the one who has no garden (my sympathy is his!) there still remains some of the essential joys of the garden, — the wonders of the catalogues, the invitation of the soil, the discriminating knowledge of the plants. A garden is only a piece of the world, — a piece that one picks out and arranges for one's own exercise and pride. Beyond it are others' gardens, also the open greensward of fields, the wonderful trees, and flowers at one's feet, the voices of birds, and the abounding atmosphere. One may sit at another's garden gate, and feel its beauty; one may wander afield in any afternoon or holiday; one may be open to the suggestion of garden and beauty as one travels back and forth, missing nothing.
We wish that every person might have a garden. We wish also that every person might have an instrument of music or good books of verse. Yet the year is not lost without them. And if one has not a garden then must one make the most of the compensations, never foregoing the satisfactions in the gardens that others make, in the gardens kept by the public for such as they. This is only to say that we would have the garden sentiment possessed of all the people, missing not one; some of the people will grow their own gardens also.
The Common Natural History
The first consideration of special study should be the inhabitants of your yard and garden: they are yours; or if they are not yours, you are not living a right life. Do you wish to study botany? There are weeds in your dooryard or trees on your lawn. You say that they are not interesting: that is not their fault.
We have made the mistake all along of studying only special cases. We seem to have made up our minds that certain features are interesting and that all other features are not. It is no mere accident that many persons like plants and animals but dislike botany and zoölogy. It is more important to study plants than special subjects as exemplified in plants. Why does the weed grow just there? Answer this, and you have put yourself in pertinent relation with the world out-of-doors.
If one is a farmer, he has the basis for his natural history in his own possessions, — animals domestic and wild, plants domestic and wild, free soil, pastures and lowlands and woodlands, crops growing and ripening, the daily expression of the moving pageant of nature. Zoölogical garden and botanical garden are here at his hand and lying under his title-deed, to have and to hold as he will. No other man has such opportunity.
I would also call the attention of the townsman to his opportunity. If the range of nature is not his, he still has the wind and rain, the street trees, the grass of lawns, the weed in its crevice, the town-loving birds, the insects, and I hope that he has his garden. Even the city has its touch of natural history — for all things in the end are natural, and we recognize them if we have had the training of a wholesome outlook to the commonplace. Timrod's sonnet on the factory smoke is a nature-note:
"I scarcely grieve, O Nature! at the lot That pent my life within a city's bounds, And shut me from thy sweetest sights and sounds. Perhaps I had not learned, if some lone cot Had nursed a dreamy childhood, what the mart Taught me amid its turmoil; so my youth Had missed full many a stern but wholesome truth. Here, too, O Nature! in this haunt of Art, Thy power is on me, and I own thy thrall. There is no unimpressive spot on earth! The beauty of the stars is over all, And Day and Darkness visit every hearth. Clouds do not scorn us: yonder factory's smoke Looked like a golden mist when morning broke."
The Importance of Seeing Correctly
Three professional fruit-growers expressed an opinion concerning the manner in which sweet cherries are borne on the tree. The first contended that the fruit grows from side spurs on twigs which grew last fall. The second was equally positive that it is borne on short spurs which grow from the point of junction between last year's wood and the wood of the year previous. The third supposed that cherries grow in pairs from most of the buds on both last year's and two years old wood. Each of these men had grown cherries for at least a dozen years, and yet neither of them knew this one of the simplest facts connected with their daily labor, and which might be made apparent by a few minutes' close observation. It is surprising that many of the commonest and most interesting of everyday phenomena, though they lie right before the eyes of every man, are never seen by the great majority of people. Most persons are walking through a wonderland with their eyes shut. The interesting things detailed in these pages are but a very few random leaves rudely torn from the book of nature.
The leaves that remain are fully as inviting, and they are doubly profitable when Nature herself tells the story.
One needs practice, along with scientific training, to interpret aright all the things that he may see. A farmer of my acquaintance noticed that grasshoppers appear shortly after the stems of golden-rods become affected with peculiar frothy swellings, and he at once asserted that the grasshoppers bred in the golden-rods! If he had carefully cut open these swellings he could have found proof enough against his assertion. Another friend noticed that the long-stalked and therefore conspicuous flowers of his pumpkins had all died: he immediately proclaimed to his neighbors that his pumpkins were blasted, and that the entire crop in that vicinity would be small! Had he known that these flowers were staminate, and that when they had shed their pollen their mission was ended, he should have had greater wonder if they had not died. Still another friend discovered a minute insect boring into a pear-tree, and as that tree happened to be blighted he announced that a certain insect was the cause of pear blight; nevertheless, a score of other trees which had the blight would probably show no sign of the ominous insect. It is never safe to draw conclusions hastily, and especially not from one or two detached observations. I will relate a very sober incident, of which an account was published a short time since in an agricultural paper, and I request that my readers bear it in mind as an antidote against hasty conclusions. An observing fruit-grower possessed a plat of smooth-fruited gooseberries. A favorite family cat, having unceremoniously died, was buried underneath one of the gooseberry bushes, and behold! the next year that bush bore hairy berries, and has so continued to do unto the present day!
A Reverie of Gardens
If I could put my woods in song And tell what's there enjoyed, All men would to my gardens throng, And leave the city void.
Into this quatrain Emerson has put the expression of a universal passion — the passion to know the fields and the growing things. This desire may express itself, as with Emerson, in a longing for the place where "the savage maples grow" and "no tulips blow," or in a yearning to break the earth and make a garden.
The nature-desire may be perpetual and constant, but the garden-desire returns with every new springtime. Recently an agitation for planting was begun in the city schools of Rochester. A local seedsman put up small packets of flower seeds in ten varieties at a cent a packet; in two weeks 11,000 packets were purchased by the children. With the first warm days of spring, the city resident goes forth with spade and hoe and fills the back yard with the tomato-plants that the enterprising gardener kindly placed on sale at the grocery-store. Frost kills the plants, but the amateur buys again, for the gardener has learned to keep up the supply of tender plants on the grocery stands. The vender of impossible rose-bushes finds a ready buyer. The tree-pruner, with occult knowledge and a secret remedy for all the ills of trees, discovers an easy client. It is the season of expectancy. Every bud is a promise. The soft, sweet-smelling earth is fat with possibilities. With a lavish hand the planter plants. The days are sweet and cool. The air is new and clean. But presently the days become pinched. The air is humming hot. The bugs grow to fatness. The weeds come. Dust settles over the herbage like a coat of ashes. One by one the plants smother and die. The enthusiasm of springtime is withering, and in the parching suns of August it is but a memory. Then come the sad ripe days of autumn. The mellow sunshine and falling leaves force one out of doors. Every nook and corner of the place is visited, for the winter is coming when the mystery of sleep will be on the garden. We snuggle the tender crowns over with leaves. We fill the beds with hardy bulbs. We see the last leaf fall. Next spring the old enthusiasm will burn again.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Liberty Hyde Bailey Gardener's Companion"
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Copyright © 2019 Cornell University.
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Table of Contents
General Advice
To One Who Hath No Garden
The Common Natural History
The Importance of Seeing Correctly
A Reverie of Gardens
The Feeling for Plants
Planting a Plant
Gardening and Its Future
Undertone
The Miracle
How to Make a Garden: The First Lesson
The Home Garden
How to Make a Garden: Digging in the Dirt
The Growing of Plants by Children: The School-Garden
307
The Spirit of the Garden
Oak
The Principles of Pruning
The Weather
What Is a Weed?
White Clover
Blossoms
The Symbolism of Flowers
Extrinsic and Intrinsic Views of Nature
The Flower-Growing Should Be Part of the Design
Annuals: The Best Kinds and How to Grow Them
Campanula
The Admiration of Good Materials
The Subject
The Growing of the Vegetable Plants
The Fruit-Garden
Peach
Where There Is No Apple Tree
Apple-Year
The Garden Flows
The New Year
The Dandelion
The Apple-Tree in the Landscape
from Lessons of To-day
Leaves
The Garden of Gourds
Lesson I.: The Pumpkin
November: June
An Outlook on Winter
Midwinter
Greenhouse in the Snow
The Garden of Pinks
December
Marvels at Our Feet
Society of the Holy Earth
The Garden Fence
What People are Saying About This
Liberty Hyde Bailey's writings are elegant, informative, and poignant. I applaud the editors for putting this fine anthology together and believe it should be on the shelves of everyone working in environmental studies today.
We owe a great debt of gratitude to John Linstrom and John Stempien for exploring and making these insightful writings of Liberty Hyde Bailey available to us all. Bailey is of course one of the great agricultural luminaries of the late 1800s and early 1900s. These incredible 'gardening' essays have seldom been brought to our attention, and now they are available for our ongoing inspiration and edification.
The Liberty Hyde Bailey Gardener's Companion makes a major contribution to literatures across a range of fields, including horticulture, environmental studies, gardening, natural resources, and philosophy. The writings it includes are a gift to our troubled world. There is no other book like it in print.
Liberty Hyde Bailey spoke to an early generation of environmentalists, and this collection brings his affection for plants and nature to contemporary ears. His affection is contagious, at once enthusiastic and practical, a powerful, lovely tool to help rekindle connections to the world that feeds us body and soul.
Every gardener, every lover of nature, will open the pages of this book and follow the deep and wise voice of Liberty Hyde Bailey transporting them through space and time, allowing them to understand how tending plants heals both the body and the mind, and how it can ultimately lead to spiritual transcendence. John A. Stempien and John Linstrom have done a masterful job of editing this stunning collection that captures the horticultural writings of one of America's best agrarian writers. In lyrical poetry and prose, Bailey, the 'Father of Modern Horticulture,' takes us through the cycles of nature, from the blossoms of his beloved apple trees in the spring, to the ripening of gourds in the fall, to the snow falling on the greenhouse in winter. With Bailey we experience the rhythms of the garden with fresh awareness and insight. We marvel as his enticing prose illuminates the holiness of the earth and of the growing things nearest at hand.