IMPORTANCE OF PLANTS — ROBBINS 311 



May I add a word of caution. We need nothing but our senses to 

 enjoy the beauty of flowers, but the deeper satisfaction of knowing 

 them and growing them requires a breadth of knowledge and expe- 

 rience surprising to the uninitiated. So long as any man out of 

 employment is considered to be a capable gardener, and seed catalogs 

 are looked upon as adequate texts, gardening is likely to be a series of 

 disappointments which only the persistent will survive. Gardening 

 as a profession requires training, practice, and a body of special infor- 

 mation, as other professions do, and the amateur, whether individual 

 or corporate does well to look to the professional for guidance and for 

 help. The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and at Edinburgh as well 

 as similar institutions on the continent have long recognized gardening 

 as a profession and have conducted courses of instruction in theory 

 and practice. In this country few institutions have as yet concerned 

 themselves with this aspect of education, though in the postwar period 

 there is going to be a considerable need for it. 



ECONOMIC IMPORTANCE OF PLANTS 



Everyone recognizes the economic importance of the common field 

 crops, wheat, oats, and corn, of the vegetables and fruits, and of lum- 

 ber. These are items in our everyday living. Not everyone realizes, 

 however, how many other products are obtained from plants. They 

 are the source of linseed oil, corn, and coconut oil, turpentine, lacquer, 

 varnish, and resin, coffee, tea, and other beverages, perfumes, flavor- 

 ings, and spices, drugs and insecticides, paper, cordage, and clothing, 

 cellulose for artificial silk, and a hundred other useful products. The 

 plant-extractives industry alone, including drugs and flavorings, prob- 

 ably amounts in the United States to between 100 and 160 million 

 dollars annually. It took a war, a war which cut us off from normal 

 supplies, to make us appreciate how much our economy and our com- 

 fort and convenience depend upon many of these plant products from 

 distant places. Rubber and quinine are two of the most generally 

 known, but there are many others, for example, the sponge of the luffa 

 gourd, the insecticide pyrethrum, chicle for chewing gum, the drug 

 ergot, agar agar, and cork. And yet in spite of the varied materials 

 we now obtain from plants the potentialities of the plant world are 

 but partially explored. What might be called economic botany is 

 largely an inheritance from our untutored ancestors who obtained 

 their information over the centuries by trial and error. Very little 

 systematic effort has been made to explore the plant kingdom with the 

 idea of exploiting products as yet unknown or unused. The wide con- 

 tacts brought through this war to hundreds of thousands of our young 

 men, many of them already trained in science, may result in new and 

 important uses for plants. The opportunity exists because not only 



