Hortus Third

Hortus Third is a reference of economically important plants in North America, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. The book was authored by Liberty Hyde Bailey (1858 – 1954) and his daughter Ethel Zoe Bailey (1889 – 1983), and published by MacMillan Publishing Co., Inc. (New York, 1976). Liberty Hyde Bailey joined Cornell University in 1888 and expanded its botanical, nature, and agricultural programs; he became Dean in 1903 and established new departments, an experiment station, an arboretum, and new courses of study. He was a plants man and avid collector of plant specimens and seed catalogs. He was a botanist, taxonomist, horticulturist, and writer.

The introduction describes the book and its scope, arrangement of content, classification system (a few things have changed since 1976), botanical names, and the abbreviations used to describe plants and geographical origin. The appendix provides a list of authors cited, a glossary of botanical terms (including leaf-shape diagrams), and an index by common name. The endplates show minimal temperature ranges for USDA plant hardiness zones in the continental United States.

The bulk of the book is devoted to describing the plants. Entries are ordered alphabetically, by genus and species, and describe the plant or tree in detail. Using abbreviations, the descriptions are concise and dense with information about names, origin, leaves, flowers, fruit, stems, bark, and so forth. Many descriptions are accompanied by illustrations and exploded diagrams, especially useful for complex flower parts. Here is a sample description, for Quercus agrifolia:

Agrifolia Née [Q. oxyadenia Torr.]. CALIFORNIA LIVE O., CALIFORNIA FIELD O. Evergreen, to 100 ft.; lvs. elliptic, to 3 in. long, spiny-toothed, convex above, somewhat stellate-pubescent, especially in axils of veins beneath; fr. maturing the first season, cup enclosing ¼-⅓ of nut. Me. to Fla. and Tex. Zone 4. Furnishes one of the most important commercial woods.

I refer to this book all the time to learn about trees and plants, and the language to describe them. My copy is second hand – from Chuck Konigsberg, a plants man and educator whom I interviewed a few years ago for a Sunset post (he, in turn, had obtained it second hand from one of his students). The book is almost 40 years old, but is still very accurate (much of the reclassification over the years has occurred in the realm of bacteria and fungi). Interestingly, the book refers to changes in classification that were occurring at the time it was published, indicating that classification is in continual flux as we learn more about the world around us! I especially like that Hortus Third was authored by a father-daughter team.