New Books on Gardening
Figs Out of Doors. By Justin Brooke. (Hart-Davis. 7s. 6d.) Two new volumes on town gardening will certainly attract many wile find urban horticulture a depressing task. When considering town gardens one must think of the typical narrow plot and the backyard, and here I always think the main trouble lies in planning the area to make the most of the unpromising shape and to mitigate the walls and fences with which it is surrounded. On this design aspect 1 ail sorry to say that Town Gardening is all but silent: it is really a genera! gardening book with some rather oblique references to town conch' tions. More pictures and plans of small gardens would have been an immense help. However, the lists of plants of various kinds are selected for town conditions and will be useful, though I think more might have been made.of the use of climbers and other plants with interesting foliage for very shaded gardens; shade, in fact, and the damp, sour soil that so often goes with it, are very important problems which are barely looked at. The chapters on window boxes, tubs, trough gardens and the like are valuable, and bulbs and other indoor plants are briefly but adequately dealt with. Flowers in Town is a more chatty and superficial book with more emphasis on window boxes and indoor plants, on which the author is quite sound, and with more imagination about the limitations of the average town site. It lacks, however, the painstaking detail SO the lists of plants in Mr. P,earson's book. As it is, a good book on town gardening, with emphasis on the design problem, remains to be written. The training of fruit trees is a subject which frightens many ordinarY gardeners; but it is certainly easier to prune and otherwise look after a cordon or espalier than to cope with a standard or even a bush tree, and in the small garden these compact forms are invaluable for every kind of fruit. Without being in any way original, Dr. Stanley EL Whitehead has, in Fruit from Trained Trees, produced a concise, handbook which should take all the difficulty out of building up and maintaining trained fruit trees: he includes all the hardy top fruits, including' the fig, and the soft fruits. There are numerous helpful diagrams and photographs; diseases and pests of each fruit are listed and a spraying calendar suggested. Mr. Justin Brooke has shown us, in the face of tradition, how readilY, peaches can be grown in the open as bush trees, and in Figs Out 01 Doors he provides a similar resume of information on figs, which h° has been growing in Sussex on a commercial scale for some long time. Mr. Brooke has an enquiring mind and is never ready to believe what he is told. In this book he shows just how easy it is to grow figs' and what a delicious fruit a ripe, fresh fig is—and in so doing be,. makes many amusing and trenchant observations on a variety 01 subjects which fig culture has brought to his notice. There are 11, number of useful illustrations. ANTHONY HUM,"
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