the District of Columbia, who covet your approval of their park 
system, with its speedway and its Japanese flowering Cherry 
trees, its thousands of miles of tree-shaded streets and its hun- 
dreds of flower Led decorated circles and triangles, which, 
curiously enough, it is a function of the War Department to 
administer, I am particularly anxious that you be made to feel 
that the thousands of research workers in that field which you 
have elected to enter with your enthusiasm and your means are 
delighted to know you are here, and are wondering in what way 
they can interest you and in what way your great organization 
and influence can help them. 
I think your membership will agree with me that the day has 
gone by when gardening means simply the growing of pretty 
flowers. It would be as reactionary to imagine this as to think of 
astronomy as a study of the signs of the Zodiac. Gardening 
leads one into the most fascinating realm of living things, and, 
to any but those who are content to stop on its threshold, it 
should furnish a field of intellectual amusement as large as it 
does a field for the exhibition of artistic taste. 
We welcome you here to Washington, because we hope that 
you will find time to make our acquaintance — not merely to 
meet our political and executive superiors, heads of our depart- 
ments, but the specialists from whom you can get a closer idea 
of the work which is being done and the workers who are doing 
it. 
I have always found a peculiar inspiration in talking with a 
man or woman who was on the point of making a new discovery, 
and I believe you will all, if you get in touch with them, find the 
same inspiration. Congressman Mann of Illinois, who is himself 
an ardent plant lover, once explained to me how, if you dug deep 
enough in any of the Departments, you would find somewhere a 
man who could tell you how the thing you want to do can be done. 
' The more detached a thing is and the oftener one hears about 
it, the more important it seems to become, and, whereas institu- 
tions such as the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller 
Foundation are names known to everybody, the Bureau of Plant 
Industry, which has to do solely with the plant industries of 
America, (perhaps because it is merged with the great Depart- 
ment of Agriculture), does not seem to have attained in the 
public mind the importance of these specially named institutions. 
I wonder how many of you know, for example, that there are 
over 900 research and technical workers in this one great Bureau 
alone and 2,100 employes altogether ; that over three and a half 
millions ($3,671,910) a year are spent in original investigations 
and in the dissemination of knowledge regarding them, and 
that last year this greatest of all plant research institutions 
distributed over 472,000 bulletins, not including many thousands 
of Farmers' Bulletins. And this great Bureau does not handle 
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