Flower Gardening: A Reader's Guide.
Cambridge University Press, for the National Book League, 1950 (May 19). One in a series of subject bibliographies (ranging from "parliament" and "ballet" to "home handyman" and "cricket," and including essays by C. Day Lewis, Elspeth Huxley, and A.A. Milne.
In Bates's seven-page essay, which is followed by a fourteen-page annotated bibliography prepared by Miles Hadfield, he writes knowledgeably and enthusiastically about books from the fifteenth century on, mostly maintaining a scholarly distance but not hesitating to insert the occasional personal opinion or the fact that he once "found the twenty-eight volumes of the edition of 1796 [of Sweet and Sowerby's gardening books] for six guineas. Its illustrations, I remember, worked out at a halfpenny a time."