FORSYTH, William.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

A Treatise on the Culture and Management of Fruit-Trees; in which a new method of pruning and training is fully described. First edition of "probably the most popular and most enduring fruit book ever in the English language" (Jansen, p. 245). Forsyth presents his method of pruning and training fruit trees, which significantly outperformed the previous dominant method and became standard in France and Germany. This copy contains the ownership inscription of the botanical book collector Jane Dalton, dated 1810.As the ward of Thomas Malthus' father, Jane Dalton (1742-1817) cultivated outstanding skill in botany, translation, and landscape gardening. Her bookplates appear in 271 volumes of the Malthus Collection, now housed at Jesus College, Cambridge. Forsyth (1737-1804), for whom the forsythia was named, was superintendent of the royal gardens at St James and Kensington. His Treatise analyses the cultivation of fruit in formal gardens, kitchen gardens and orchards, providing an overview of maintenance and harvesting. The Observations on the Diseases, Defects, and Injuries of Fruit and Forest Trees had been separately published in 1791.

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