THE NATIONAL NURSERYMAN 
131 
mental shrubs, its pleasing drooping habit making it very 
useful for the foreground of plantings. 
South of the latitude of Philadelphia Ligustrum Japon- 
icum and lucidum have a limited use in landscape work, 
but not nearly so much as they deserve. 
Where they are hardy they merit as free a use as the 
hollies and laurels receive in I lie 
English 
gardens as 
they give equally good effects. 
The privets have so many points in their favor they de¬ 
serve a little more exploitation by nurserymen and land¬ 
scape gardeners. 
Easily propagated, tenacious of life even in very un¬ 
congenial conditions, they will grow in city yards where 
most other plant life barely exists, rarely attacked by 
pests or disease and withal very ornamental. Planted 
on a lawn and grown as a single specimen their period of 
attractiveness is much longer than many oi the flowery 
shrubs more commonly used in this way. 
Many of the flowering shrubs are very beautiful while 
in flower, say ten days or two weeks; the balance of the 
year they have little to commend them, not even a pleas¬ 
ing habit of growth and do not compare at all with the 
ligustrums in this respect. 
MAKE IT EASY TO DO BUSINESS 
Selling goods at a profit is the aim ot all good mer¬ 
chants and to do it successfully buying must be made 
easy. A very trifling thing will often influence the cus¬ 
tomer to buy or the reverse. 
Of course if a person needs an article and must have 
it the sale is practically made before he orders it, but 
even under these circumstances other things being 
equal, it is more likely to be ordered from a source 
where it can be obtained with the least exertion. 
Experienced store keepers are quite familiar with 
this fact and weigh very carefully the subtleties for 
and against the location of a store. 
Sometimes one side of a street has a great advantage 
over the other or the entrance on the level, up steps 
or down steps and many other trifling influences slight 
in themselves make a large difference in the total value 
of the sales over an extended period. 
Nurserymen do not have stores but the same laws are 
at work in their policies, catalogs, service or any other 
means by which they present their goods to the buying 
public. 
How much easier it would be to sell fruit trees, il 
it were practical to sell them covered with ripe fruit, 
instead of a potential bunch of dry looking sticks, and 
perhaps what is a greater deterrent of sales is the 
knowledge of the buyer that he has to plant them or get 
some one else to do il for him. Of course this knowl- 
ege does not affect the enthusiastic gardener but it does 
affect the potential customer who has not yet acquired 
an interest in planting. 
No figures are available to find out what proportion 
of nursery stock is sold direct to the consumer for him 
to plant himself as compared with that supplied and 
planted by nurserymen, jobbing gardeners, florists and 
other distributers who include planting service when 
supplying the stock. 
Years of retail selling to the consumer has convinced 
the writer that a greater consumption of nursery stock 
depends on a greater and better planting service than is 
now in operation. 
In spite of all the catalogs, books, propaganda and 
other means to arouse the interest of the public in plant¬ 
ing these educational processes are too slow and un¬ 
certain to be really as effective as they should in de¬ 
veloping a market for nursery products. 
There are very many people who would like to have 
nice surroundings and yards and grounds tastefully ar¬ 
ranged, but their interest is not keen enough to take up 
the study themselves or to overcome the inertia neces¬ 
sary to do the work themselves. A nurseryman’s cata¬ 
log or an article in the paper does not quite fill the bill. 
What is really required is someone to supply the plants 
and plant them. Practically all nurseries doing a retail 
business do planting to a greater or lesser extent, but 
the ability to do a very great amount is limited largely 
by the short period when it can be done and the im¬ 
possibility of expanding the organization to take care of 
more than a limited amount of outside work in addition 
to that demanded on the nursery. 
It would seem as if the most logical thing to do would 
be to encourage and develope the small landscape man 
or jobbing gardener as more efficient distributers of 
nursery stock. There is only one way to do it and that 
is to make it worth their while. Other lines of business 
in distributing their goods give their agents exclusive 
territory and helpful cooperation, and it would seem as 
if the distribution of nursery stock calls for develop¬ 
ment along this line. The idea of course is entirely 
apart from the nursery salesman who merely takes or¬ 
ders and delivers the goods. What is needed is coopera¬ 
tion of intelligent salesmen-planters who draw their 
stock from one nursery exclusively in their particular 
locality. 
Annapolis, Nova Scotia, April 4, 1922. 
National Nurseryman, 
Flourtown, Pa. 
Under present conditions a Canadian nurseryman is 
seriously handicapped when it comes to buying in the 
United States market, A one-sided bargain is rarely to 
be continuously repeated; your Quarantine No. 37 pre¬ 
vents me from shipping to the United States where I 
had a moderate amount of trade, but where, at present, 
there is so much “red-tape” that it no longer pays me to 
ship small orders; customers will not go to the trouble 
of complying with the law when their order is for but 
a few dollars; it has, practically, stopped me from ship¬ 
ping to the States. 
Your Fordney tariff is another thing; it may not 
affect nursery stock particularly, but it does particularly 
affect the Canadian farmers who buy my stock. 
Freight rates are so high that they come to more than 
the cost of the stock in many instances, and I can buy 
goods in Europe and get them here by ocean freight for 
a less price for freight than I can get the same goods for 
in the States. 1 used to buy quite largely of the late D. 
S. Lake, whose death 1 regret lo learn of in the paper you 
