An 1860 Appeal for Biodiversity

The How to Lay Out a Garden book is getting technical. It really isn't about veggies per se. This book considers your home's entire outdoor environment as "the garden". Lots of detail about landscaping, and what you should see from the dining room windows. It even tells how to use perspective to plant a small tree strategically to hide an unpleasant view from a window, where you might think a large tree would be needed. It talks about relative costs and benefits of different kinds of pathways and shapes of flower beds along those paths, and the effects you can achieve. Interesting, but I'm looking to lay out a kitchen garden MUCH smaller than a half-acre, without a 14-foot wall on the north side to espalier fruit trees. My wall is a good bit smaller.

Here is another useful quote, before I move on to another food-gardening book:

 

Most persons will be agreed, in the main, as to what is really beautiful, though almost everyone will have some kind of favoritism or prejudice. Considering the multitudinous forms of vegetable life, and the fact that all are endowed with more or less attractiveness, I have been often struck with the narrowness of affection for plants which is commonly possessed; many people have a few favorite trees or shrubs, proscribing nearly all others... But I cannot, and do not profess to comprehend, why gentlemen should impoverish their plantations, and strip their gardens of the first element of beauty, by cultivating only a few particular species of plants, and not merely harboring, but cherishing a dislike to all others. A garden or plantation denuded of half or three-fourths of its proper ornaments, is much in the same predicament as an individual with only a portion of his ordinary garments. It is imperfectly clothed, insufficiently furnished,  weak in its expression of the beautiful.

Edward Kemp's 1860 appeal for biodiversity is still pertinent.