Cbe 'Rational IRurscryman. 
FOR GROWERS AND DEALERS IN NURSERY STOCK 
The National Nurseryman Publishing Co., Incorporated 
Vol. XXVIII HATBORO, PENNA. APRIL 1920 No. 4 
The Association: Its Aims and Progress 
Before the Gardeners' and Florists’ Club of Boston, March 16, an address by John Watson, Secretary, American 
Association of Nurserymen. 
A S Secretary of the American Association of Nur¬ 
serymen, I am interested in the nursery bus¬ 
iness. It is the most interesting thing in the 
world to me. But when I think of business, I think of 
something more than the dollars brought in by the re¬ 
sults of our thought and labor. The money can do no 
more than buy us food and clothes and shelter. True, it 
takes quite a lot of it these days to buy even those things; 
but the man who has unlimited money can only buy un¬ 
limited food and clothes and shelter. Some time ago I 
heard a lecture by John Galsworthy who defined wealth 
as visible ability to buy the things a man wants. And he 
pointed out a great fact when he added that to want no 
more than one can buy is another way to express posses¬ 
sion of wealth. I preach contentment, then; for the whole 
secret of happiness is to be content with what we have. 
We have a lot of discontent and unrest in this country 
and that is partly because we have taught unrest and dis¬ 
content. We have taught that discontent is the spur to 
achievement. We have taught the doctrine of the stren¬ 
uous life. Now if that means simply the spur to do more 
in order to have more, it is unsound; but if to work hard 
and well for the joy of working, yes; for no man can ex¬ 
pect happiness from the mere coining of his labor into 
dollars; they will buy no more than the essentials to liv¬ 
ing. I like the old-fashioned prayer in the Anglican ser¬ 
vice that we omit in our strenuous and ambitious 
America; that we be given contentment in the state to 
which God calls us. When we teach our American boys 
that every one of them has the chance to be president, I 
say we do them injury! they can’t all be president and it 
is lucky for them that they can t be; but the effect ot that 
sort of teaching is to plant ideas that do not fit the sta¬ 
tion in which the majority must live. It stimulates am¬ 
bition, and disappointment breeds discontent. We point 
to some of the great captains of finance who were poor 
boys and we tell young America that they, too, have the 
same opportunity to amass great wealth. And we give 
them to think that the possession of wealth is something 
to be desired. It is not. The thing for us to teach is that 
wealth is neither necessary nor desirable. The things to 
be desired are health and strength and work to do. Work 
well-done will bring whatever is required for our ne¬ 
cessities; to be content with that and with our condition, 
is to be happy. When we are useful and happy and 
when we contribute to the happiness of others, we have 
fulfilled our mission. 
So I want to say that our occupation as gardeners and 
florists and nurserymen must mean much more to us 
than the money it brings us, because the money means 
so little. A man gives to his business eight or ten hours 
of every day; we florists and nurserymen give ours from 
ten to fourteen hours daily; if we love and respect it and 
find our happiness in it,—as we must to find it at all,— 
we give more time than that, for our evenings are largely 
given over to the literature of our trade. Does any man 
of us consume one-half of the short space of our tenancy 
of this beautiful world, solely in pursuit of the money 
we earn? If I work today only for the purpose of living- 
to-morrow, I become altogether useless and unhappy. 
There must be the joy of doing the thing worth doing; 
doing it as well as it can be done; or as well as our abil¬ 
ity permits. My work must be good and it must be use¬ 
ful ; my business must be clean and wholesome and hon¬ 
orable. It must be that I must see that it is that; and I 
must see that no cause is given to have another put upon 
it an estimate lower than my own. It matters not what a 
man does; the important thing is how well he does it, 
provided it is something useful. Mr. Chief Justice White 
holds the most exalted secular office on earth; but the 
man that screens your potting-soil and the one that digs 
out in the garden or runs the mower across the lawn, if 
they do it properly, are surely as useful and honorable 
in the employment as the judge oil the bench. As George 
Ade says, “it doesn’t signify how long you stick around; 
its what you put across that counts.” 
I take it that this is the estimate that nurserymen put 
upon what they are doing; the expression of their respect 
for themselves and their business. And when we come 
to fix our status, I think we should ask ourselves if we 
are not something more than merely manufacturers and 
merchants? The man who makes and builds and shears 
and shapes an evergreen into beautiful symmetry or 
trains a tree so that it will be fine and straight and hand¬ 
some, is by way of being an artist. He works with living 
materials while the sculptor works in marble. And 
what should be his return? I assume that he has his 
reward in the satisfaction of producing well; but in 
money? I hear a great deal about costs. Surely nobody 
wants to work at a loss and therefore it is profitable to 
keep account of what one invests in time and money to 
produce the things we sell. It is easy enough to do that. 
And yet the figures that result are difficult of interpreta¬ 
tion and application. If I grow a block of apple trees, 
I can keep such accounts as will tell me the cost of each 
one of those trees. But the figures obtained apply only 
to those particular trees; they have no bearing on last 
year’s nor next year’s trees; nor any trees grown in any 
