44 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. — SECTION C. 



much truth, that Cape plants are difficult to grow; but the fact 

 remains that a large number of them, and these by no means 

 the most attractive, have at one time or another been success- 

 fully cultivated in Europe; even to-day, when Cape plants are 

 somewhat " out of fashion," you will find at Kew, at Dahlem 

 and I believe also at Edinburgh, Vienna and elsewhere in 

 Europe, a greater variety of South African plants than in the 

 gardens of the Cape itself. Hundreds of visitors touch at Cape 

 ports, especially at Cape Town, during the year. They enquire 

 times without number " Where can we see the Heaths, the 

 Proteas, the Orchids, the succulents, the bulbs and other consti- 

 tuents of the vegetation for which South Africa is famous the 

 world over " ? They are told " You must climb Table Moun- 

 \ain, wander over the Cape Flats and visit the Karoo, Xama- 

 qualand and the East; we fill our gardens with plants very 

 many of which you can see to better advantage in Europe, the 

 States or Australia; our own vegetation which you are discern- 

 ing enough to praise is difficult to grow." The inheritors 

 of one of the most remarkable and most beautiful of existing 

 floras, we take so little interest in it that we have not yet been at 

 the trouble to bring its treasures into cultivation ! Such as we 

 do find room for, we grow because the enterprise of European 

 horticulturists has made them popular and, as a rule, we are 

 content to be ignorant that we have but brought them back to 

 their own country. This is surely not in harmony with the 

 traditions of South African patriotism! A tardy recognition of 

 a national duty has given rise to legislation designed to protect 

 some of our more attractive and rarer plants from a threatened 

 extinction, but we cannot stop here. The public taste must be 

 stimulated to a proper appreciation of the sesthetic value of one 

 of the most striking of the products of the country, and our 

 duty as custodians of a unique vegetation — many of whose con- 

 stituents have already disappeared, and others can with diffi- 

 culty be saved— must be realised. These objects have been for- 

 warded and to a large extent achieved in other countries by 

 National Botanic Gardens, and a similar institution here, with 

 the prestige of a Government Department, administered on 

 scientific lines and accessible to the public would undoubtedly 

 do much to remove what is at present a national reproach as 

 well as a neglect of what might be an important commercial 

 asset. Anyone who has seen Kew on a summer Bank Holiday 

 does not need to be told that an institution of this kind is a 

 valuable means of education. Offering not even the attraction 

 of a band and without anv adequate provision for the supph- of 

 refreshments, Kew Gardens are thronged with visitors, mainly 

 from London, whose occupations are such as to keep them 

 away at other times of the year.* To realise the extent to 

 which these crowds voluntarily forego the time-honoured privi- 

 leges of the British picnicker, of strewing the ground with 

 waste-paper and broken glass, and assist the caretakers in pro- 



* On the three summer Bank Holidays of igio the recorded numbers of 

 visitors to Kew were respectively • 120,561, 152,454, 129,984. 



