434 THE MONTHLY BULLETIN. 



OPPORTUNITIES FOR PROFIT IN HORTICULTURE. 



By Myrtle Shepherd Francis, Ventura, Cal. 



Do not think that the word "profit" in the title of this paper means 

 wealth, for if you are to receive any message from me, it must come 

 from my enthusiasm, my love for my work, and not from my ability to 

 accumulate money. There is no "get rich quick scheme" in horti- 

 culture for men or for women, and while it is my hope that all Avomen 

 who walk the flowery or thorny pathway of horticulture may have a 

 wide margin of financial profits, I hope, too, that they will realize that 

 there are other than pecuniary profits ; that health of mind and body, 

 the joy of blue sky and fresh air, the feel of the good brown earth 

 to your body, the insight into the many forms of life heretofore 

 unknown, the friendships otherwise impossible and the freedom from 

 conventionality will aid them if, at the end of the year, the margin 

 narrows down and they find that expenses have eaten away the hoped-for 

 balance. 



All sorts of problems confront us today, and women who have been 

 reaching out for political responsibilities must not shrink from the 

 physical labor that these responsibilities carry with them. For, with 

 all of these movements of "Back to the Land" comes the necessity for 

 the labor of women as well as men, and the time is not far distant when 

 a woman will drive her traction engine as easily as she drives her auto 

 today, nor will she feel it a greater hardship to hoe and spade than to 

 wash or scrub. "Will this woman be an American woman? 



California offers greater opportunities for women who wish to pursue 

 horticulture as a means of earning a livelihood than other states. "We 

 are entering into a new era; our great Panama Canal is open, suffrage 

 has put women on an equal footing politically with her brothers and the 

 same opportunities are offered to her that are offered to them, with the 

 same hardships, responsibilities and risks that they have, plus home, 

 children and lack of business experience, quite often, to hamper her. 



"What are some of these opportunities that horticulture offers women ? 

 "Wholesale seed and plant growing, nursery stock, vegetables, small 

 fruits, cut flowers, decorative work, nature study classes, garden super- 

 vision, teaching botany, teaching school gardening, landscape gardening, 

 hybridizing, plant pathology, and general farming; above all is the 

 opportunity to labor. 



One of the most alluring of these occupations, and one that women, 

 by their finely developed senses, should be eminently fitted for, is land- 

 scape gardening. It is a field almost untrod by them, and California 

 gardening as an art is yet in its infancy, so the women who choose this 

 profession have opportunities undreamed of for pleasure and profit. 



California is entering into a new era in more ways than one. The 

 enormous acreage of cultivated land, the great number of imported 

 plants, the climate so conducive to the growth of the higher forms of 

 plant life and also to the "rapid transit" of the lower forms has con- 

 fronted the growers with all sorts of problems. 



There is comparatively little knowledge regarding the diseases that 

 every plant is host to. Speaking of this need not long ago to a promi- 

 nent plant pathologist, he answered that there are not enough young 



