Amberley wrote for practising orchardists rather than gentleman botanists, and it shows: the grafting instructions in the third chapter are still sound. This copy is complete with the folding plate of rootstock cross-sections at the rear, which is missing from roughly half the copies that come through the trade.
The binding is contemporary calf, sympathetically rebacked at some point in the nineteenth century — the original spine label has been preserved and laid down over the new leather. Internally the paper is largely clean, with light foxing confined to the preliminary leaves, consistent with a book that spent its working life on a shelf rather than in a library.