The Canadian Horticulturist Volume 05, No. 7

Delos White Beadle (October 17, 1823—August 30, 1905) was a horticulturist, journalist and municipal politician from St. Catharines, Ontario. He edited the Canadian Horticulturist from 1878 to late 1886, and was the author of Canada's first gardening guide, Canadian fruit, flower, and kitchen gardener.

As a horticultural journalist, Beadle was active from the 1860s through the turn of the century. He took charge in 1864 of the horticultural department of George Brown*’s new Canada Farmer, edited by William Fletcher Clarke, and held the position for about ten years. From its inception in 1878 to late 1886, he served as editor of the Canadian Horticulturist, the long-lived monthly of the Fruit Growers’ Association. His extensive writing for these publications ranged from discussions of apple cultivation and grape hybridization, through analyses of scores of fruit cultivars, to advice on growing flowers in urban conservatories and farmhouse dooryards. In 1885, for example, he favourably assessed the now famous “McIntosh red apples” sent him by Allan McIntosh of Dundela, Ont., son of John McIntosh*. Beadle’s most important work, designed “to furnish the Canadian cultivator with a reliable guide,” was Canadian fruit, flower, and kitchen gardener . . . , whose nearly 400 pages of advice were thoroughly grounded in the experience of its author and his correspondents. Published in Toronto in 1872 and embellished with chromolithographic plates, this text was the first truly Canadian book on both the utilitarian and the ornamental branches of horticulture and, for this reason, it continues to be a valuable resource in the study of Canadian garden history.

—Dictionary of Canadian Biography