Horticulture
Liberty Hyde Bailey worked to remove the barriers between theoretical botany and practical horticulture. He believed that horticulture should be an applied science based on pure biology, and that it should reflect the application of basic botanical knowledge. As early as 1885, in a speech titled “The Garden Fence,” Bailey urged botanists and horticulturists to reconcile their interests by “getting the science from the field and laboratory into the garden. ” At Michigan, he served as chair of horticulture and convinced the State Legislature to appropriate funds for a horticulture building. He had already written a number of articles, and in 1885, he published his first book, Talks Afield: About Plants and the Science of Plants.
In 1888, Bailey joined Isaac P. Roberts at Cornell to create an outstanding team for teaching, research, and dissemination of knowledge about agriculture. He continued his own inspired teaching and pioneering experiments. In 1892 he published the first American book on controlled experimental breeding, Cross Breeding and Hybridizing, which cited the work of Gregor Mendel. As an experimentalist, Bailey made controlled crosses and kept accurate records. He also published the first detailed study of the growth of plants under artificial electric light in 1893; showed that the growth of greenhouse plants could be increased by raising the carbon dioxide content of the air; and studied the physiology of seed germination and its relation to the quality of commercial seed packets.
The Garden Fence
...the botanist shall climb the garden fence and include within the realm of his science all the plants which we till.
-L. H. Bailey. “The Garden Fence”
Lecture Read at the Country Meeting of the Massachusetts State Board of Agriculture at Framingham, December, 1885. Boston: Wright & Potter, State Printers, 1886.
The Cyclopedia of American Horticulture
L. H. Bailey. Cyclopedia of American Horticulture, Comprising Suggestions for Cultivation of Horticultural Plants, Descriptions of the Species of Fruits, Vegetables, Flowers, and Ornamental Plants Sold in the United States and Canada, Together with Geographical and Biographical Sketches. New York: Macmillan, c.1900-1902. Volume 1 (A-D)
The Botanical Gazette declared in 1900:
To the botanist, the Cyclopedia is a mass of most valuable information, bringing together as it does, into available and properly edited form, the immense contribution of facts from horticulturists to the whole evolutionary doctrine, and enabling the morphologist to know what form he is handling and what has been done with it. The work should find a place in the libraries of all botanical laboratories as well as in those of practical horticulturists.
Cucurbita cultivars in The Cyclopedia of American Horticulture
Liberty Hyde Bailey coined the term “cultivar” from “cultivated variety.” This term is now defined in the International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants (1980) as “an assemblage of cultivated plants which is clearly distinguishable by any characters (morphological, physiological, cytological, chemical, or other) and which, when reproduced sexually or asexually retains its distinguishing characters.”
Cucumber Cross
Cyanotypes of Sion House, Telegraph, and White Spine cucumber pollination experiments, L. H. Bailey photographic album, 1891.
Bailey used his camera extensively to record horticultural experiments. Here, he has recorded the success of pollination experiments, inscribing directly onto the photographic prints.
Hortus
An annotated inventory of the species of plants and their main botanical varieties now in cultivation in the United States and Canada outside botanic gardens... together with brief indications of uses and methods of cultivation.
-L. H. Bailey and Ethel Zoe Bailey, compilers. Hortus: A Concise Dictionary of Gardening, General Horticulture and Cultivated Plants in North America. New York: Macmillan, c. 1930.
Working with his daughter, Ethel, Bailey decided which cultivated species and their varieties to include, perusing nursery and seed catalogs, horticultural books, correspondence and botanic garden inventories. Particular attention was given to cultivated herbaceous plants, which “do not receive equal attention with trees and shrubs and their identities are not so well established since they are readily distributed by seeds and are likely to be fugitive.” Hortus Second appeared in 1941 and Hortus Third was published in 1976.
Gentes Herbarum
Gentes Herbarum. “Plantae Chinenses,” Vol. 1. Ithaca, N.Y.: L. H. Bailey Hortorium of the New York State College of New York State College of Agriculture, 1920.
In 1920, Bailey launched a scientific journal that concentrated on horticultural taxonomy by including profiles of individual plants or plant genera of horticultural merit, as well as nomenclatural changes from recent research. His first paper, “Plantae Chinenses,” described twenty new species in thirteen genera and fifteen new varieties and forms, some wild, some cultivated from China.