Garden Chrysamthemums

Garden Chrysanthemums (1957) by A. G. Carpenter and E. Snelling – Collingridge

Few flowers manage to look quite so respectable while simultaneously being so determined to take over an entire border.

The chrysanthemum is one of them.

Garden Chrysanthemums, written by A. G. Carpenter and E. Snelling and published by Collingridge in 1957, is a proper old-school gardening guide devoted to the cultivation, care and general management of one of the great stalwarts of the British garden.

This is from an era when gardening books assumed the reader might actually do some gardening.

There are no lifestyle photographs of somebody drinking coffee beside a strategically placed trowel. No vague advice to “embrace seasonal colour”. No suggestion that a plant will thrive if you simply connect with it emotionally.

Instead, this is practical horticulture.

Chrysanthemums, despite their cheerful abundance, are not entirely casual plants. They can be generous, spectacular and deeply rewarding, but they also appreciate being propagated, pinched, fed, watered, staked, protected and generally supervised with the sort of attention normally associated with minor royalty.

Carpenter and Snelling guide the reader through the business of growing chrysanthemums properly, covering the practical knowledge needed to produce strong plants and impressive flowers.

Published in 1957, the book also captures something of the golden age of serious amateur gardening, when suburban plots, allotments and back gardens were treated as laboratories of personal excellence and there was a very real possibility that your neighbour was quietly judging your dahlias.

Chrysanthemums were not merely flowers. They were a statement.

A well-grown display could suggest patience, skill, discipline and a willingness to spend unreasonable amounts of time tying plants to canes.

A poorly grown display suggested you had other priorities.

There is something tremendously appealing about vintage specialist gardening books like this. Modern gardening advice is often compressed into three bullet points and a cheerful icon. Older books tend to assume that if you have bought a book specifically about chrysanthemums, you are serious enough to hear the details.

And there are details.

Soil preparation, propagation, feeding, flowering, disbudding, training and seasonal care all become part of the great annual campaign to persuade the plant to produce exactly the blooms you had in mind.

For collectors of vintage gardening books, this is also a lovely period piece.

The language, cultivation methods and assumptions reflect the gardening culture of the 1950s, when many households still had a deep practical knowledge of plants and gardening magazines could discuss compost mixtures with the gravity of an engineering manual.

This copy is in Good condition, which is a pleasing survival for a gardening book now approaching seventy years old.

Books like this were not usually purchased simply to decorate shelves. They were taken into sheds, consulted beside potting benches, propped open with dirty fingers and occasionally exposed to soil, water and whatever substance the gardener had just been mixing in a bucket.

The fact that this one has made it this far in good shape suggests either careful ownership or an unusually tidy chrysanthemum enthusiast.

Ideal for gardeners, horticultural historians, collectors of vintage gardening literature or anyone who feels modern chrysanthemums are simply not being taken seriously enough.

Also suitable for people who would like to learn how much effort was once considered perfectly normal in order to produce a really impressive flower.

Sold by Crappy Old Books, where we admire any plant that can survive frost, pests, bad weather and several decades of changing gardening fashion — especially if it has better posture than we do.

ISBN: None
Condition: Good

Keep browsing: See more Gardening books Other books by AG Carpenter and E Snelling