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About Orchids is a classic gardening guide by Frederick Boyle. I thank you for reminding your readers, by reference to my humble work, that the delight of growing orchids and flower gardening can be enjoyed by persons of very modest fortune. To spread that knowledge is my contribution to philanthropy, and I make bold to say that it ranks as high as some which are commended from pulpits and platforms. For your leader-writer is inexact, though complimentary, in assuming that any 'special genius' enables me to cultivate orchids without more expense than other greenhouse plants entail, or even without a gardener. I am happy to know that scores of worthy gentlemen--ladies too--not more gifted than their neighbours in any sense, find no greater difficulty. If the pleasure of one of these be due to any writings of mine, I have wrought some good in my generation. With the same hope I have collected those writings, dispersed and buried more or less in periodicals. The articles in this volume are collected--with permission which I gratefully acknowledge--from The Standard, Saturday Review, _St. James's Gazette_, National Review, and _Longman's Magazine_. With some pride I discover, on reading them again, that hardly a statement needs correction, for they contain many statements, and some were published years ago. But in this, as in other lore, a student still gathers facts. The essays have been brought up to date by additions--in especial that upon Hybridizing, a theme which has not interested the great public hitherto, simply because the great public knows nothing about it. There is not, in fact, so far as I am aware, any general record of the amazing and delightful achievements which have been made therein of late years. It does not fall within my province to frame such a record. But at least any person who reads this unscientific account, not daunted by the title, will understand the fascination of the study.

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Frederick Boyle (1841-1914) was an English author, journalist, barrister, and orchid fancier. Born in Stoke-on-Trent, Boyle was a nephew of Joseph Meyer. He matriculated in 1859 as an undergraduate at Brasenose College, Oxford, [1] and was called to the bar in 1866.[2] In 1863, he went to Sarawak with his brother: this visit provided material for a book, [3] and chapters in several other volumes of travel accounts from Asia, South Africa, and Central and South America He also published a number of novels and a variety of articles in journals. He described himself as a barrister and journalist in census records from 1871 to 1901; in 1911 he just did 'literary work'. He was a newspaper correspondent in the Russo-Turkish war and was a regular contributor to the Daily Telegraph, the Pall Mall Gazette and periodicals such as All the Year Round, Blackwood's, Cornhill, The Illustrated London News, Temple Bar, The New Review, and The Nineteenth Century. He collaborated with Ashmore Russan on three titles serialised in the Boy's Own Paper and later published as books In later life he wrote a number of books about orchids, which he kept as a hobby. He committed suicide in Bayswater Road, London, April, 1914, when 'much depressed'

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