30 ESTABLISHMENT OF A NATIONAL BOTANIC GARDEN. 



But there are other and still more important services that a National Botani- 

 cal Garden can render. It should contain plantings of all the native trees and 

 shrubs of the various States, that can be grown out of doors in this climate in 

 a condition of health and beauty. The garden should be a great public educator 

 in the art of landscape gardening. It should be so located and so conducted that 

 visitors from every part of the United States will carry home with them an 

 impression of what they may do, in their own communities, and largely with 

 their own native materials, to make life more natural and more enjoyable, and 

 consequently more effective. 



Our nursery catalogues are in a condition of great confusion as to the names 

 and the varieties of ornamental plants. The new garden should ' contain 

 authentic examples of these varieties, so that nurserymen may be sure that the 

 things they are selling are accurately named in their catalogues. The purchas- 

 ing public would then buy with greater confidence and with great freedom. 



These and other useful purposes the new garden can be made to serve if it is 

 located on the admirable site recommended by the Fine Arts Commission, with 

 its large area, its varied topography, and its many types of soil. 



The new garden can be made to perform one function, however, more im- 

 portant than any of those I have mentioned, more important indeed, in my 

 opinion, than all the others put together. To this use of the garden I should 

 like to call the special attention of the committee. I refer to the relation of 

 the garden to the breeding of new plants useful to man. 



. It is my opinion that in the next 50 or 100 years we shall make greater 

 advance in the development of useful plants than has been made in the whole 

 history of the human race up to the present generation. All the conditions are 

 ripe lor that development. Science and practice are united in the enterprise. 

 The State agricultural experiment stations, the biological research laboratories 

 of our universities and other institutions, and many individual experimenters, 

 are pushing forward with this work. The Department of Agriculture is bringing 

 together, little by little, from distant parts of the world the wild relatives of 

 cultivated plants. There is no place in or near Washington, however, in 

 tvhich they can be perpetuated. Some of them find use in other places, but 

 many need a recognized situation here where they can be kept for observation, 

 study, and experiment. Such a place would be afforded by a National Botanical 

 Garden located on the site recommended by the Fine Arts Commission. If a 

 properly equipped garden is established there, it is inevitable that it would be 

 a center about which would ultimately focus much of the plant-breeding work 

 of the Department of Agriculture. 



The Smithsonian Institution is the custodian of an immensely valuable 

 botanical collection of more than a million specimens from all parts of the world. 

 Practically all the plants of the world will ultimately be represented in that 

 collection, which is known as the United States National Herbarium. When 

 a properly equipped botanical garden is established in Washington the Smith- 

 sonian Institution will undoubtedly find that the most useful location for the 

 National Herbarium is in or near that garden. 



We have no botanical library in Washington. The two or three hundred 

 professional botanists working here use the botanical books belonging to vari- 

 ous public libraries, including those of the Department of Agriculture, the 

 Smithsonian Institution, the National Museum, the Library of Congress, and the 

 Library of the Surgeon General's Office. Some day a wise person, or a wise 

 Institution of great wealth, will found a botanical library in Washington, for 

 it will be more useful here than anywhere else in the world; and that library, 

 when founded, will, like the National Herbarium, find its most useful location 

 in or near the garden I have described. 



Washington will then have the following equipment: A botanical garden 

 containing the world's most interesting plants, a library containing the world's 

 botanical literature, a herbarium containing specimens of practically all the 

 kinds of plants in the world — and these things will be utilized by hundreds of 

 active botanical workers in Washington and elsewhere. 



As an illustration of the value of easily accessible greenhouses, let me cite 

 a piece of work of my own on the blueberry. For several years we have been 

 engaged at the Department of Agriculture in an attempt to domesticate this 

 wild fruit, and after prolonged experimentation our object has been accom- 

 plished. Our hybrid bushes have yielded such an abundance of berries, so large 

 and so delicious, that they have brought returns to the -rower at the rate Of 

 nearly a thousand dollars an acre. We have changed the blueberry from a 



