4 
FLORIDA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY 
progress possible. But I also feel sure 
that the weakness of our organizations 
lies too largely in the. fact that the coef¬ 
ficient of irritability is too high with most 
of us and we indulge in destructive crit- 
cism of each other which is reflected in 
the public’s attitude towards us and we 
do not get the hearing which we deserve, 
nor the money which we need and should 
have. 
If I only knew you all personally I 
would like to introduce you to each other. 
I hope that those of you who are both¬ 
ered with a natural reserve will recollect 
that this is a meeting for the purpose of 
making new friendships, that you have 
come for that purpose, and, reserve or no 
reserve, will introduce, yourself to any¬ 
body who you think can advise you or 
who in any way interests you. 
Before turning you loose, so to speak, 
on each other and on the community, 
there are two facts which it seems im¬ 
portant to emphasize. 
The first is that the Plant Introduction 
Garden on Brickell Avenue, which I hope 
you will all see,, is not an Experiment 
Station, and it is not an arboretum. It 
is a plant propagating garden primarily 
where mother plants are kept from which 
propagating material can be taken for 
budding and grafting onto small seedlings 
which are sent out all over the United 
States—wherever they can be grown. It 
is under the auspices of the Federal De¬ 
partment of Agriculture and the Bureau 
of Plant Industry and is one of six sim¬ 
ilar gardens located in various parts of 
the United States and maintained by the 
Office of Foreign Seed and Plant Intro¬ 
duction. The new plants which the ag¬ 
ricultural explorers of that office find in 
gardens are first made available to 
the experimenters in the State Experi¬ 
ment Stations and then to private exper¬ 
imenters who apply for them to the 
Washington central office. 
It cannot avoid being a center of infor¬ 
mation but it publishes no bulletins of its 
own and carries on no plot experiments 
with fertilizers and makes no pretense to 
anything but what it is; a place where the 
new plants which are imported through 
the international machinery of the Fed¬ 
eral Department of Agriculture are main¬ 
tained and increased as rapidly as funds 
and the nature of the plants will permit. 
It contains only 6 acres of land which 
are leased for a nominal sum from Mrs. 
Mary Brickell and the lease has only eight 
years more to run. It was started in 
1898. 
Through the generosity of Mr. Charles 
Deering a new site consisting of twenty- 
five acres at Buena Vista has become the 
property of the government and on it 
there have already been assembled many 
new plants which will be interesting to 
the members of this society. Unfortu¬ 
nately, shortage of funds and the war 
have seriously interfered with the rapid 
development of this new garden. 
The superintendent of these two gar¬ 
dens is Mr. Edward Simmonds, too well 
known to many of you to need any intro¬ 
duction. His assistant is Mr. Steffani, 
and it will be. their pleasure as well as my 
own to meet any members of this Society 
at any time of day at the older of these 
two gardens—that on Brickell avenue, 
below Twentieth street. 
