THE INDEPENDENCE OF AMERICAN NURSERIES 



215 



will grow and thrive in his dooryard his mind goes back 

 to his unhappy experience and he shakes his head and 

 turns away with the thought in his mind that he has an 

 unlucky hand with plants. The department store has 

 advertised its own name, but the nurseryman has lost a 

 customer, and the dooryard of at least one house is still 

 ugly with dirty bricks and an ugly ground line. 



Now I am not in possession of the facts to accuse the 

 department stores of doing this wittingly, neither do I 

 have any figures to show that the percentage of failures 

 from this imported material is greater than from home 

 grown nursery stock. I do know of instances where 

 totally unsuitable plants have been imported and sold 

 cheaply through department stores and others and died, 

 and the stores have shifted the responsibility upon the 

 foreign importer. The question concerned here is not 

 one of the dependence of our nurseries at all. They do 

 not, as I understand it, court or countenance this trade in 

 cheap plants from abroad. 



But how large a part of this item of $805,305 repre- 

 sents plant material of this kind, I am unable to state. 

 The fact ought to be determined and the advisability of 

 its exclusion considered, provided that it represents a 

 danger to our forest or street or park or ornamental plants. 



That the American nurserymen need foreign plants 

 in their business is a fact which ought to be given due 

 consideration. Thousands of plant breeders and horti- 

 culturists are working in the gardens and orchards and 

 nurseries of other parts of the world and an increasing 

 number of new and valuable plants are being brought 

 into existence, so to speak, and many of these are of dis- 



tinct value to the people of this country, and the nursery- 

 men of America represent the machinery through which 

 these new plants can reach the commercial orchards and 

 gardens of the country. 



The inroads of diseases which we already have among 

 our trees and other plants may make it imperative at any 

 time to import some other species or variety to take its 

 place. The spread of the chestnut bark disease and the 

 search in China for a resistant form has led to the impor- 

 tation of millions of seeds of the downy chestnut of East- 

 ern China, a resistant form unfortunately of small size 

 but producing excellent chestnuts. The devastation pro- 

 duced by the pear blight which has swept the orchards 

 of the Pacific Coast and causes millions of dollars' loss 

 each year has centered attention recently upon a sturdy 

 wild pear immigrant from the hills around Jehol north of 

 Pekin, which Rcimer of Oregon has discovered is prac- 

 tically immune to this disease and at this present moment 

 Mr. Meyer, our explorer, is buying up as many seeds as 

 he can get of this disease-resistant species in order to test 

 it in commercial orchards throughout this country. 



Of course, it is conceivable that the Phylloxera might 

 have been kept out of Europe indefinitely, but when it 

 did get in, what are we to say about the r61e which the 

 French and American nurserymen played in the rehabili- 

 tation of their vine-growing areas ? And what would the 

 vine growers have said to a policy which had restricted 

 all the imports of the Phylloxera-resistant American 

 stocks to the few hundreds or thousands which might be 

 brought in through the slow and deliberate process of 

 Government importation? It is true that in importing 



MILLIONS OF YOUNG TREES GROWING IN A NURSERY 



This view in one of the D. Hill Nurseries, Dundee, Illinois, gives one but a faint impression of the extensive nurseries of this firm, which are now growing 

 millions of young, home-grown trees for planting out in this country. White Cedar, Thuja occidentalism to the left; Norway Spruce, Picea excelsa, to the right. 



