BOTANY FOR LIVING 5OI 



of mine who are hunters and fishermen admit the therapeutic aspect of their 

 trips comes from close contact with nature. This becomes a more pleasurable 

 experience when the plants they encounter can be recognized by name and 

 their habits are known. 



It is a strange inconsistency that men are generally as interested in garden- 

 ing and other plant hobbies as women ; foresters, horticulturists, nurserymen, 

 and landscape specialists are usually men. Our most talented hobbyists in 

 raising special types of plants, such as cacti, peonies, and orchids, are men. 

 Yet among young people botany is often considered a field of knowledge best 

 suited to old maids and emasculated males. At the high school level botany 

 is often avoided in planning a college course because of the misconception 

 that our subject is not a ''he-man" one. My college career in teaching included 

 a real challenge when I and my colleagues in the botany department had to 

 "sell" botany at Colgate University, an all-male college. We soon learned 

 that much must be added to the available material in the older textbooks and 

 great ingenuity used in motivating the subject matter to make botany courses 

 acceptable and valued by the students who voluntarily select them. The more 

 the subject matter revolved about living plants in the outdoors, the more 

 students attended the courses. Plants will always, I hope, be of interest to 

 the ladies ; their presence as students and partners in any botanical adventure 

 adds an understandable stimulus to our work. But when our young students 

 become enmeshed in the modern trends of living, they will thank us many 

 times over if we have given them a background in the enjoyment of plant 

 life which they can profit from all their lives. 



Apart from general botany, some of the more specialized courses present 

 opportunities which must not be overlooked. Plant taxonomy should not be 

 based on an excessively detailed study of a particular flora, nor limited 

 primarily to specific areas familiar to the teacher; neither should it be pre- 

 occupied with rare species which always thrill the professional taxonomist 

 but are rarely a problem in the everyday life of the average American. Some 

 of this may be necessary. But there can be added enough of the representa- 

 tive and significant species to be encountered in all our states to give the 

 future layman some general knowledge to start with. A particular lack in 

 many taxonomy courses, and perhaps also in field botany, is the neglect of 

 cultivated species. Often the introduced varieties are more common than the 

 native ones. Having had a thorough taxonomy course at Yale, I was dismayed 

 at my ignorance on a first trip from New York to Key West, as I discovered 

 pawlonias in blossom, chinaberry trees loaded with fruits of last year, avenues 

 lined with casuarinas, and a host of exotic palms. If one spends a full week 

 or two on the species of Crataegus there isn't much time left to brief future 

 visitors to our parks or travelers in the southland on the outstanding genera, 

 native and introduced, which they will encounter. 



Plant physiology can be made a most valuable botanical subject to the 



