The Planter's Guide Or, A Practical Essay on the Best Method of Giving Immediate Effect to Wood, by the Removal of Large Trees and Underwood; Being an Attempt to Place the Art, and that of Geneneral Arboriculture, on Fixed and Phytological Principles by Steuart, Sir Henry - 1828

Edinburgh and London: John Murray, 1828. Second edition, greatly improved and enlarged. Illustrated with six engraved plates, octavo, pp xxxviii, 527, sadly the plates are heavily foxed which has also affected the neighbouring page, howver the remainder of the text is remarkably clean and very tight and sound; bound in a contemporary half calf, rubbed, rebacked sympathetically with a new calf spine. lightly tipped-in at the first page is a small advertisement leaf warning of 'sundry ignorant and uneducated persons' attempting to pass themselves off as having been trained by Henry Steuart - this seems to be scarce. [Steuart , 1759 - 1836, was a Scottish landowner, agricultural improver, soldier and classical scholar. Owing to bad health Steuart abandoned most of his literary work, and experiments in arboriculture became the chief interest of his life. In September 1823 a deputation from the Highland and Agricultural Society, which included Sir Walter Scott and Lords Belhaven and Corehouse, visited Allanton, and reported on the improvements effected there by Steuart's system of transplanting large trees. Though he had had to contend with an unfavourable soil and an exposed position, he ‘attained at no extraordinary expense the power so long desired of anticipating the slow progress of vegetation, and accomplishing within two or three seasons those desirable changes in the face of nature which he who plants in early youth can, in ordinary cases, only hope to witness in advanced life.’ From this time Steuart frequently corresponded with Sir Walter, who imitated several of Steuart's experiments at Abbotsford. When, in 1828, Steuart published this work, Scott reviewed it enthusiastically in the ‘Quarterly’ (March). When Scott visited Allanton in January 1829, in company with Lockhart, he noted in his journal: ‘Sir Henry is a sad coxcomb, and lifted beyond the solid earth by the effect of his book's success. But the book well deserves it.’ The book was also favourably reviewed by Southwood Smith in the ‘Westminster Review,’ by Professor Wilson (‘Christopher North’) in ‘Blackwood's Magazine’ (April 1828), and in the ‘Edinburgh Review’ (March 1829). It had a large circulation in America. In his preface to the second edition Steuart claims to have made the first attempt to apply the principles of physiology to practical arboriculture, and to have created the new science of phytology.. Second edition. Half Leather. Good.