Gardening

Includes works on the growing of fruits, vegetables, flowers, and herbs. Place farming under AGRICULTURE. Place scientific works about plants under SCIENCE.

I think the lines between "Gardening" and "Agriculture" are a lot fuzzier than this scheme implies. There are several plots of land in my town where vegetables are being grown on less than an acre of land. One of them is a "microfarm", which sells the produce -- the others are community gardens, where people grow it for their own use. So a book about one of these would be under Agriculture, but the other under Gardening? When you wouldn't know just by looking at them which is which?

People pointed this out earlier, of course, in the initial discussion of the top-level categories. While it's true that fuzzy boundaries don't imply the categories don't have validity, this one seems particularly murky.

The other murky boundary is that between gardening and landscape architecture/garden design. While not entirely happy with DDCs strict division of the two topics I have enough examples of the latter in my own collection, where the 'growing' is almost incidental to feel that this needs some further teasing out.

I have a fair number of books that I have tagged 'gardening'. What they have in common is that they deal with what I, or other people, do with a plot of land, usually, but not always, adjacent to, and complementing a dwelling. Even when the book is a description of a grand historical garden there is an emphasis on the activity of gardening. I do not distinguish between 'productive' and 'decorative' gardening. I look at garden design and plant growing as separate at a second level under a common top level.

I do not give the 'gardening' tag to books about landscape architecture on a public scale, farming, market gardening, scientific botanical works, landscape from a geographical viewpoint, etc. even though there may be an overlap in content with my 'gardening' books.

Please check out this thread (http://www.librarything.com/topic/60594) for a link to the new OSC blog and a call for specific volunteer involvement. Thanks!