Amateur Gardencraft: A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover

Eben Eugene RexfordProject Gutenberg · United StatesMar 2023

Rating 3.0
Word count
346K words
Chapters
35

Tags

Motivation and Growth Healthy EatingFamily TableEveryday LifeNature DelightDaily ReflectionsLife WisdomGardening GuideIllustrated StepsPractical GuideBeginner Friendly

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Amateur Gardencraft: A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover by Eben E. RexfordAuthor: Rexford, Eben E. (Eben Eugene), 1848-1916,Language: English, Class: SB: Agriculture: Plant culture, Release Date: May 1, 2008

Editor's review

This is a practical guide for home gardeners and garden lovers, in which Eben E. Rexford discusses planting and layout in the home setting in a friendly tone. The book focuses on how ordinary households can tend a garden under limited conditions, showing a strongly practical orientation from planning to routine care rather than pursuing the abstruse theories of professional horticulture. As a free Project Gutenberg eBook, it is extremely easy to obtain and serves as a window into early twentieth-century Anglo-American ideas of home gardening. The style is essayistic and easy to read, and can be compared with actual practice. For readers who want to start gardening from scratch and hope for an overall approach rather than scattered tips, this book offers a fairly complete introductory framework; it is also a gardening-cultural document marked by its era, letting one sense the attitude toward living with nature found in early gardening writing.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Read through the whole book first to grasp the overall framework, then choose workable chapters according to the actual conditions of your yard or balcony.
  2. While reading, note down suggestions that do not match local climate and soil conditions, and avoid copying them directly.
  3. Read alongside a modern gardening manual and use contemporary materials to supplement outdated technical details in the book.
  4. Turn the seasonal tasks described in the book into an annual gardening calendar and practice while reading.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35

FAQ

Is this book suitable for complete beginners with no gardening experience? It is suitable as an introductory read. The book starts from the overall idea of home planting, in a plain tone, and assumes no specialist knowledge. However, it was written early, and some specific practices carry the limitations of their time; beginners had best also consult a modern local gardening guide, combining the book's principled suggestions with current climate, variety, and tool conditions.
Can the gardening advice in the book still be followed directly today? The book's approach and attitude still have reference value, but specific technical details need to be judged with care. Varieties, fertilizers, pesticides, and tools of the early twentieth century differ from today's, and climate conditions in some regions have also changed. Treat the content as inspiration for ideas and methods, and in practice rely on local agricultural extension agencies or modern gardening manuals.
This is an original English book; can I read it if my English is not good? The whole book is in English, in an essayistic style; the sentences are not very difficult, but it involves gardening terms and plant names and requires some English foundation. Readers with intermediate English reading ability can work through it chapter by chapter with a dictionary; if you only want gardening knowledge, you may first read a Chinese introductory gardening book and use this as supplementary reading for early gardening writing.

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About the author

Eben Eugene Rexford Author · American · 1848–1916

Eben Eugene Rexford (1848–1916) was an American author and poet, born in New York State and died in Wisconsin. He is known for the lyrics of the popular song "Silver Threads Among the Gold" and was also a prolific writer on gardening, contributing to the Ladies' Home Journal for fourteen years. His gardening books, written for ordinary home readers, include Amateur Gardencraft, A-B-C of Gardening, and A-B-C of Vegetable Gardening, which explain the basics and practical operations of home gardening in plain, friendly prose with an emphasis on usefulness. Three of his works are included in the collection, commonly classified under inspirational growth. Overall, his writing combined literary talent with the popularization of gardening and earned him a place in early twentieth-century American popular gardening literature.