suburbs how city back-yards and small suburban places 

 may be treated, by proper planting, to relieve their 

 barrenness and make of them attractive homes. 



Our large population lives for the most part in daily 

 contact with ugly surroundings. In our schemes for 

 social welfare we have devoted too little attention to 

 beauty. To make the Botanical Garden beautiful will 

 help to supply a need of the City that is quite as impor- 

 tant in advancing our civilization as the City's more 

 material needs. A beautiful Garden appeals to the eye 

 as music does to the ear. 



Up to the present, the Garden's scientific researches 



have been confined chiefly to the field of systematic 



botany, and less attention has 

 Future Research 



been given to other fields of the 



vast science of plants. But the problems in these other 

 fields are so timely, so promising and so immediately 

 connected with the welfare of mankind, that their solu- 

 tion should now be undertaken as additional contribu- 

 tions to knowledge. These problems have to do with the 

 plant as a living organism — with its normal, healthy life- 

 processes, its disease-processes and its processes of in- 

 heritance and the production of new and often better 

 types. For example, the trees of our forests, our parks, 

 our city streets and our suburban homes, afford a wide 

 range of problems: What are the chemical requirements 

 in the soil, of the various species of our forest and shade 

 trees? If soils are deficient, how may trees be profitably 

 fed? The mere presence of an essential chemical con- 

 stituent in a soil does not mean that such a substance is 

 available to the plant — how can it be made available? 

 What are the physical requirements of the soil, as to 

 temperature, moisture and aeration? How can the 

 growth of the roots of trees best be promoted ? What are 

 the exact relations to the nutrition and growth of their 



[10] 



