Every Man His Own Gardener. Being A Complete Gardener’s Calendar And General Directory;.
Bound in contemporary green cloth (now faded), with blind stamped borders and decorations, gilt. Hinges starting to weaken but sound, slight water stains on first few pages. Inscription, Mr Wilkinson 1856, at top of p.1. Early pencil notes on rear endpapers and paste-down.
£45.00
Details
LATER EDITION OF FAMOUS GARDENING BOOK, 1848.
Publisher
Longman and Co., etc.,
Place
London.
Date
1848
Synopsis
Containing directions for all work necessary in the kitchen garden, orchard, hot-beds, flower garden, pleasure garden, shrubbery, green-house, hot-house, vinery, etc. for every month in the year with practical directions for raising, propagating, and forcing; and also observations relative to soils and situations; to which is added a complete systematic catalogue of plants proper for cultivation in british gardens, with directions for their culture. by thomas mawe and john abercrombie. improved and brought down to 1838, by james main, a.l.s. twenty-fifth edition. with notes and additions, and the catalogue of plants and fruits corrected to the present day, by george glenny, f.h.s., author of 'the properties of flowers and plants,' etc.
Item Description
The 25th Edition, small 8vo. 4.5 x 7.5 inches. xvi + 415 pp. + [1] pp. 2 blank leaves on blue sugar paper inserted between p. 414-5.
Illustrations
Illustrated by a portrait frontispiece and two engraved plates.
Notes
First published as Mawe's Gardener's Calendar in 1767, this proved to be one of the most popular gardening books of its era and indeed continued to be revised as late as 1879. It is arranged by the months of the year, with lists of plants at the end. In fact it was not written by Thomas Mawe, but by John Abercrombie (1726-1806), son of an Edinburgh market gardener, who had worked at Kew and other royal gardens and later established his own market gardens in the London area. Having expanded his practical observations into book form, his publisher, William Griffin, submitted the publication to his friend, William Mawe, gardener to the Duke of Leeds. Mawe 'bore testimony to the merit of the production, and prefixed his name to the publication in order to give it that celebrity to which it was so justly entitled, for which he received a gratuity of twenty guineas.' Following the great success of the book, Mawe, a notable figure in the gardening world, invited Abercrombie to visit him in Yorkshire. There the author saw 'a gentleman so bepowdered, and so bedaubed with gold lace, that he thought he could be in the presence of no less a personage than the Duke himself.' (both quotations from Blanche Henrey). In spite of this the two became friends and Mawe gave Abercrombie further information to use in his published works. From the seventh edition of 1776, Abercrombie added his own name to the title page. George Glenny (1793-1874), who edited the 1848 edition, was a landscape gardener and author of many popular books on horticulture. He founded the Gardener's Gazette, the first weekly gardener's newspaper, in 1837. This edition is scarce; COPAC records only four copies in British libraries, Oxford, Cambridge, the National Library of Scotland and Glasgow.
[Stock No. 21017]
