ave 
nutrition, plant diseases, genetics and plant breeding, and plant 
geography, so that research along applied lines may be planned 
and carried out more efficiently, with a view to meeting the needs 
of the war and of the difficult post-war period. 
Reports of progress in various research problems at the Garden 
during 1942 are given on pages 75-84. One hardly needs to 
stress the importance of investigations of plant diseases. Results 
of such studies, conducted at the Garden during the past thirty 
years, have not only had wide practical application, but the annual 
cost of maintaining our horticultural collections is greatly in- 
creased by plant diseases that necessitate unceasing attention, the 
purchase and application of insecticides and fungicides, and the 
frequent replacement of woody and herbaceous plants that have 
already required skilled labor in planting and cultivation, not to 
mention the marring of the beauty of the plantations and their 
educational impoverishment that may result from the ravages of 
plant diseases. These may, at times, require years to correct, as 
when a few years ago, a young Red Elm (Ulmus serotina) in the 
Garden, after several years of care, had to be cut down and burned 
because it was found to be infected by the disastrous Dutch Elm- 
disease. Throughout the park systems of our cities such casual- 
ties occur constantly, entailing annual losses of tens of thousands 
of dollars. See also, on page 77, the report of our loss of Iris 
through “root-rot.” 
Tue PLANTATIONS 
Maintenance —‘What [ aspired to be, but am not, comforts me,” 
wrote Browning. Whatever may be true of an individual, a 
botanic garden can derive little, if any, comfort in having aspired 
to perfect maintenance from its beginning, but having never been 
able closely to approximate that ideal, solely because sufficient 
funds have never been available to make perfect maintenance 
possible. 
Of a staff of twenty-two gardeners, two give all their time and 
one gives half time in the conservatories; two are required for the 

experimental garden, which is not one of the public exhibits, leav- 
ing seventeen gardeners to maintain fifty acres of intensively culti- 
