JOURNAL 
oF 
The New York Botanical Garden 
Vou.X July, 1909. No. 115, 
THE PASSING OF THE WILD FLOWERS.* 
An INVESTIGATION OF THE PRoBLEM OF New York Clty. 
The wild flowers in the vicinity of New York City are doomed! 
They are perishing before the advance of the city and their most 
loyal friends are powerless to save them. Long since they dis- 
appeared from the older parks, and in the newer parks they are 
being exterminated as fast as the people who “love them” are 
able to accomplish it. In Van Comune and Pelham Bay and 
Crotona Parks, they are being slaughtered by their loving friends 
and carried off by the armful; “If I do not get them, somebody 
else will,” is the universal cry. 
y is not far distant when thousands of human beings 
will be unable to form any conception of the country with its 
native trees and flowers and birds. The children not only will 
be ignorant of nature, but they will grow up without the power 
to form mental pictures and thus will be deprived of much that 
is best in literature. In this deplorable state of affairs, however, 
there is one bright ray of hope. This ray of hope emanates 
from the New York Botanical Garden, a park so located as to be 
accessible to the masses for a five-cent fare. This reservation 
includes about two hundred and fifty acres of land so diversified 
in character that ee flora of rock and hillside, of swam 
meadow, of pond and stream, of open woodland and hemlock 
gorge are Say. ee 
* Awarded the first prize, competition of 1909, iy the Caroline and Olivia 
Phelps Stokes Fund for the Preservation of Native Plan 
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