The Garden-Companion. For Gentlemen and Ladies; or, a Calendar, pointing out what should be done every Month, in the Green-House, Flower, Fruit and Kitchen-Garden; with the proper Seasons for Sowing, Planting, &c. (with the Time when the Produce may be expected) so as to have a regular Succession of Flowers and Vegetables throughout the Year. To which is added a compete List of Flowers and Shrubs that blow each Month: with some curious Observations.

Bookseller Notes

An early and unrecorded edition of a charming pocket-sized gardening calendar. Such calendars proliferated in the late eighteenth century, providing monthly (and, as here, weekly) tasks for the budding home-horticulturist. Gardening was increasingly viewed as a polite occupation, and these manuals were designed to appeal to a growing middle class; the owners of small country houses, villas, and houses in the proto-suburbs. The work reflects the common arrangement of gardens at the time, with sections on kitchen gardens, pleasure-or-flower gardens, and green houses. Trusler taps into the gendered expectations of gardening; gentlemen will bend the earth to their will and 'supply their tables with everything in season', while ladies will enjoy growing and arranging flowers, and find that it 'contributes to their health'. The introduction confidently concludes: 'If they carry this book about with them, and have recourse to it occasionally, when they walk in the garden, they, in a very little time, will be masters of the whole of it'.There is no other record of this edition. In volume II of her British Botanical and Horticultural Literature before 1800, Blanche Henrey notes having seen only a seventh edition, published c. 1795, with a 'Trusler at the Literary Press' imprint (vol. II, p. 469). She also cites the book's advertisement in Trusler's Elements of Modern Gardening (1784), from which she extrapolates his authorship of the work. The present copy has no authorial attribution, and is doubtless an early production, if not the first edition. This copy stayed in one Buckinghamshire family for several generations; notes to the endleaves state that it belonged to a gentleman of Chalfont St. Peter, and was used by his great-granddaughter. ESTC reference, for the later edition: T40422.