Home > Special Collections > Exhibitions > Cultivating Gardens >

Case seventeen

Gardening handbooks

Whitcombe and Tombs were New Zealand's leading publishers of household manuals, on both cooking and gardening. At the end of the 1st World War, they began a series of New Zealand Practical Handbooks. For amateur gardeners, the series provided advice on vegetable growing, flower gardening, rock gardening, rose growing, fruit growing, and the cultivation of native plants.

The author of the handbooks on vegetable (1918) and fruit growing (1921) was John Thomas Sinclair (b. 1872), Head Gardener to A. E. G. Rhodes of Te Koraha, Christchurch.

List of items

Dunedin Botanic Gardens' Curator, David Tannock was responsible for the handbook on rock gardening. He had started the rockery on the banks of Lindsay Creek in 1904, within a year of his appointment.

List of items

The botanist and pioneer ecologist Leonard Cockayne (1855-1934) wrote the first popular book on growing native plants, The Cultivation of New Zealand Plants (1923) as part of Whitcombe and Tombs' New Zealand Practical Handbooks series. Though he recognised that some gardeners' motivations to do so reflected innate patriotism, he was also aware that popular taste for novelty played a role, for it was the nursery-selected bronze and variegated varieties that were the best sellers (as they still are).

List of items

Two authors collaborated on the manual on flower gardening: David Alexander Hay was the son of the pioneer Auckland nurseryman David Hay and ran the family business, Montpellier Nursery, until his death in 1933. James Young (1862-1934) was Curator of the Christchurch Botanic Gardens from 1908-1933, having trained in England and worked in Victoria, Australia. As an expert on roses—the Christchurch Botanic Gardens rosery was probably the largest in Australasia—James Young also wrote the series' handbook on rose growing (ca. 1919).

List of items