The Garden Books

It is a debatable question whether garden books belong to the summer or the winter season. Do you want to read about things when they are before your eyes or when they have betaken themselves to the realms of memory and imagination? The immediate response which the devotees of gardens gave to The Little Garden, by Mrs. Francis King, when the Atlantic Monthly Press published it two years ago this summer has led them to believe that ‘emotion remembered in tranquillity’ is not the only emotion which such a volume provokes. Accordingly we are making summer books both of Mrs. King’s second volume in the ‘Little Garden Series,’ Variety in the Little Garden, and of The Spirit of the Garden, by Martha Brookes Hutcheson, each published almost simultaneously with the July issue of the Atlantic.

Portions of the text of each of these books are already known to readers of the House Beautiful. The books themselves — Mrs. King’s a brief, practical handbook, Mrs. Hutcheson’s a lavish assembling of beautiful pictures and illuminating text — are described in some detail in the advertising pages of this number, another counter of the same shop to which this monthly talk so frequently recurs.