A pioneering work on date cultivation in Iraq. It was the first work solely devoted to the Iraqi date in any European language.
Valentine Hugh Wilfred Dowson (1896-1980) was an army intelligence officer and authority on date cultivation. His treatise, which is Vol.1 of a planned three volume work (Vol.2 was published in 1922 and is extremely scarce; Vol.3 was never issued), was published as part of the Agricultural Directorate of Mesopotamia (Memoir III), a series of highly specialised pamphlets focusing on agricultural development, soil studies, and crop cultivation in post-WWI Mesopotamia.
Focusing on ’The Cultivation of the Date Palm on the Shat Al ‘Arab’, it contains information on cultivation, soil, tillage, subsidiary crops, irrigation, pruning, fertilisation, ripening, harvesting, propagation, marketing, uses of the date palm and its products, diseases, and a chapter dedicated to the vocabulary of terms used in date culture.
