More Garden Books

Of all the publications of spring, garden books may seem the least appropriate for discussion in February. Yet if winter comes — it is not necessary to complete the quotation which the publishers of Bartlett have now made thrice familiar. Spring and early summer will be celebrated by the Atlantic Monthly Press through the publication of two new garden books. The many readers of The Little Garden, by Mrs. Francis King, will count it good news that we have in hand a sequel to it in the form of another book by Mrs. King, Variety in the Little Garden. This is the second volume in a ‘Little Garden Series’ under Mrs. King’s general editorship. Arrangements have already been made for a third volume, Peonies in the Little Garden, by Mrs. Edward A. Harding, to be published late in 1923. Several kindred volumes are already definitely in prospect.

A more elaborate garden book, now in process of manufacture, is The Spirit of the Garden, by Martha Brookes Hutcheson (Mrs. William A. Hutcheson), now a consuiting landscape architect in New York, and for many years a creator of beauty in the country places of many Americans with a taste for nature in the hands of art. She writes with enthusiasm about the essential things in garden beauty, and illustrates her book with a wealth of photographs from her own collection — pictures largely of her own making and representing both Old-World gardens and scenes for which she has herself been responsible. The plans for the book are made with an eye to a beauty matching that of its material.