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This chapter discusses several books published in the 1650s, with serious attention given to horticulture. Pride of place in the literary effort to promote horticulture was given to John Evelyn because he exerted great influence over gardening. He wrote several books about horticulture and these include The French Gardener and Elysium Britanicum. Another book on horticulture had appeared by John Worlidge, including Systema Horticulturae. Ralph Austen and John Beale also contributed by publishing Herefordshire Orchards.

This chapter focuses on the importance of dairying, horticulture, and poultry-keeping as they entered on a new phase of enterprise in the years after 1879. Horticulture and poultry-keeping had been given a strong stimulus in the 16th century when contacts were strengthened with the food and farming traditions of Continental Europe. Dairying started to take its place in the agricultural industry around 1650. While the profits of grain and meat production were good enough, other branches of farming effort were not closely explored.

The main idea in this chapter is that the "love of plants should be inculcated in the school." While there "are many practical applications" for children to gain knowledge of "plants and horticulture," Bailey indicates that the knowledge is more than "information of plants themselves." Rather, such knowledge "takes one into the open air… It increases his hold on life." The chapter concludes with types of school gardens: ornamenting the grounds, establishing a collection, making a garden for instruction, and providing a test ground for new varieties.

The poetic entry for the term "Oak" from Bailey's Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture is offered here. The oak "connects the present with the past. It spans the centuries." As elsewhere, the poetic and the scientific merge in this essay about this commonly known tree species.

Gourds are distinct both in that their autumn harvest "contains" the summer months and in that their use for domestic ornamentation carries them "through to the holidays and beyond." Bailey notes that the primary interest in gardening gourds and the development of their fruits belongs to "the gardener and the horticulturist."

Chapter 7 examines how new improving organisms, fruit trees, moved into the landscape through commercial networks. Between 1820 and 1850, fruit landscapes changed dramatically—semi-wild seedlings gave way to named varieties, each the product of cuttings from a single tree. Fruit trees became relatively cheap markers of rural refinement, which sometimes descended traceably from aristocratic gardens, but also filled commercial orchards planted for domestic and global markets. Since fruit varieties reproduced only through human networks, they can show us the rising dominance of the nurserymen who came to refer to themselves as “pomologists.” Nurserymen struggled to create markets for named fruit, because varieties were easily confused and counterfeited and shifted their character as they were moved. Nurserymen partially stabilized varieties through the writing of books of description, the creation of profiles and systems of taste, and then finally, through huge pomological conventions at which they battled over and rated fruit. Their efforts to fix value borrowed from other features of the antebellum economy, like counterfeit detectors, and credit ratings. Ultimately, tensions between marketability and connoisseurship produced at best, uneasy compromises about the nature of value, compromises continually disturbed by the stream of novelties on which the tree market depended.

Industrialists exploited the powerful cultural, symbolic and metaphorical meanings of gardens and parks to ‘engineer’ particular feelings, ideas, modes of behaviour and well-being amongst employees and consumers, particularly women. Gardens and landscaping had at times been employed for these means since the beginning of the factory system, but by the end of the century, landscaping at factories was becoming more sophisticated in terms of design and amenity. In America from the 1880s and to a lesser extent in Britain from the 1900s, the expertise of professional landscapists with specialist design and horticultural knowledge made it possible to enhance the beauty, function and symbolic value of the available space with the ultimate aims of increasing productivity and profit. Whilst promoted as a means to create a healthy environment, the union of gardens and factories was a form of social engineering to manipulate employees and to promote industrial capitalism as healthy, respectable, responsible and sustainable; therefore gardens and parks became agencies of control.

This chapter discusses Oshosi/Ochosi (minor God of Hunting), Orisha Oko/Oricha Oko (God of Horticulture and Farming), Ibeji/Ibeyi (the Sacred Twins), and Aganju/Agayú (ruler of the desert-like earth and owner of volcanoes). It also looks at minor Nigerian orishas who are also known in Cuba. Each god has their own worship practices, traditions, and myths in Africa and Cuba, which are discussed in detail in this chapter.

The soils of western Europe are marked by superficial accumulation of organic matter as a result of its climate being temperate, rather wet, and leading to leaching and soil acidification. Soils are largely of Holocene age, many properties still being determined by their highly varied parent material. Even more prominent are the impacts of man in this densely populated and highly industrialized part of Europe, causing many soils to be partly or completely of anthropogenic origin. In this chapter, these main soil traits, their origin and distribution will be discussed, attention also being paid to the terminology used and its backgrounds. In the temperate, humid climate of western Europe, organic matter tends to decompose slowly, giving rise to accumulation of above-ground litter and to dark-coloured, humus-rich mineral topsoils. The retarded decomposition is associated with a low activity of soil biota and rather massive production of soluble organic acids, and particularly brought about by the prevailing site conditions such as relatively poor drainage, high precipitation, low temperature, and acid parent material. These site conditions are found over large tracts of western Europe, which therefore have acid, nutrient-poor soils with prominent accumulation of organic matter, such as Podzols and Histosols of the North European Lowlands, and Umbrisols of the middle and high altitude mountains. Bioturbation in these soils is generally weak and therefore soils have distinct horizons and a sharp boundary between the organic surface and mineral subsurface horizons, and thus exhibit large contrasts in soil properties with depth. Where parent materials are more basic and capable of neutralizing acids (e.g. limestone and marl) or climatic conditions are more favourable (e.g. in southern France), litter decomposition proceeds faster and soil biota are more active. In such soils, finely divided organic matter is intimately mixed with mineral material, litter layers are thin or absent and soil reaction tends to be neutral to slightly acid. Moreover, soil horizon differentiation is less prominent as a result of bioturbation, particularly by earthworms. The variation in topsoil properties is so prominent that it was immediately recognized in the early days of soil science and led to a still existing terminology for the description of topsoil organic matter.

This chapter explores interwar suburban gardening. There were some four million new suburban gardens created over this period and probably, at least as many new gardeners. Gardening became a mass leisure activity for the first time, while suburban gardens also served a number of other valuable functions, such as growing produce. This chapter examines the range of attitudes among suburban families towards gardens which could be seen as a resource and/or a chore. Garden provision by local authorities and speculative housing developers is reviewed. Typical uses of the front and back garden are then discussed, together with sources of gardening materials and advice; garden styles, designs, and functions; and the role of gardens in encouraging both neighbourly cooperation, rivalry, and, in some cases, resentment.

In Louisa May Alcott’s Work, the independent-minded protagonist Christie Devon learn the limits of her self-sufficiency as a wage laborer in nineteenth-century America and is driven to the brink of suicide by financial and social dislocation. To recover her bodily and spiritual health, Devon moves to the country to work in a greenhouse that buffers her from the alienating and uprooting work in industrializing America. In the country, Devon works to heal herself within an economy of salvation that rejects the system of wage labor that rewards individuals who seek independence by accumulating private property. In Work, people learn to be themselves by producing the right kinds of dependence. Rather than free themselves from social forces, characters like Devon realize that their attempts to achieve freedom from social constraints are misplaced. Faced with harsh realities, they reframe their personal goals in terms of moral responsibility to change an unjust world.

Although species diversity may be a useful shorthand for addressing ecosystem health and function in relatively circumscribed areas, plant species richness and its effect in small designed landscapes in an urban matrix are not easily quantified. Functional and structural diversity at higher taxonomic levels are more appropriate measures for assessing diversity. Even when horticultural layouts include both remnant native species and appropriate introduced species, urban gardens do not contribute significantly to ecosystem function in cities or suburbs.

This chapter invites the reader to consider ways in which farm based dementia care may offer alternative ways of engaging in nature among settings such urban day centres. This chapter outlines the importance of sharing innovative practices which may challenge notions of dementia care and aims to provoke debate about diversification in dementia services for all.

Chapter 17 investigates the development of the Iranian institutions of estates and gardens. It examines the continuities and changes in the development of the paradise as well its ideological role from the Achaemenid to the Sasanian period.

Chapter 5 focuses on archaeological investigations along the Chickahominy River and a history of residential settlements, subsistence practices, and burial grounds during the Middle to Late Woodland transition. In the sixth century A.D., Native communities living along the Chickahominy River began to bury the deceased in communal burial grounds (ossuaries) located in the drainage’s swampy interior. During the Late Woodland period, new places were established along the Chickahominy with the construction of dispersed farmsteads, burial grounds, and a palisaded compound. In this history of placemaking we see evidence of the spatial practices whereby forager-fishers became the Chickahominy. As is apparent from colonial accounts of the Chickahominy, the “coarse-pounded corn people,” a horticultural economy was a part of this ethnogenetic process. Bioarchaeological study of skeletal remains from the Chickahominy, including stable isotope analysis, provides a basis for considering the history of maize-based horticulture in the region.

This chapter discusses several economic empowerment programs that were specifically designed for women who have experienced various forms of trauma and abuse, or that have been adapted for use with this population. The chapter offers examples of especially innovative program and highlights a therapeutic horticulture program located at a battered women’s shelter. The chapter also reviews the available empirical evidence regarding the outcomes of these programs and implications for prevention of revictimization.

This chapter details the ethnographic and archaeological research conducted at Futuna Island. In pursuit of a Yale doctorate, the author navigates the island's people, terrain, and even its ubiquitous pigs as he attempts to discover the cycle of planting, tending, and harvesting represented by the different pondfields found on the island. Futuna proved to be a living museum of Polynesian horticultural knowledge, passed down through countless generations. Such knowledge also once existed in Hawai‘i but was already dying out when Edward Craighill Handy conducted his studies of the Hawaiian planter in the 1930s. Alongside Futuna, Kirch also takes a brief look at ‘Uvea, which had originally been part of his fieldwork before the challenges posed by Futuna and its sister island Alofi forced him to limit the scope of his research.

This chapter describes how the popularity of gardening within the nation's upper class helped shape the identity of James F. Brown. The Verplancks participated in a rising national horticultural movement and cultivated a wide range of produce including salsify, okra, spinach, rhubarb, and asparagus. By the time Brown became a Verplanck family servant in 1828, the range of cultivating work at their estate was substantial. He eventually took over as master gardener in 1836. The successful performance of his work not only aligned Brown with the Verplancks' gardening interests, but it also attested to his participation with them in the burgeoning national horticultural community. This community was defined by the formal establishment of horticultural societies, regular society meetings, society publications, and society exhibitions. Brown was linked to practically all of them.