THE NATIONAL NURSERYMAN 
83 
lislied. Business to be profitable, must be permanent; 
ours is a continuing business; very often it passes down 
fiom father to son; it has the advantages and the disad¬ 
vantages of permanency ; it means the possession of real- 
estate and crops that are carried in stoek for from two to 
ten years; once in, you arc in to stay, unless, unhappily 
the sheriff should close you up. Now if permanency is 
requisite to success, the confidence of the buying public 
is of vital importance. The relationship of the 
nurseryman to the public is peculiar in this; 
that a larger degree of confidence has to be imposed in 
him than in almost any other tradesman. I can go into 
one of your flower shops and I see what you have; I 
know if it is what I want; but in the case of nursery 
stock it is different. We can’t look at trees and tell what 
they are; some of them, we know at a glance; but many 
things do not bloom nor fruit until some years after the 
customer buys them. The man who invests in a piano or 
an automobile or a suit of clothes or any of the things of 
ordinary commerce, can see the goods and when be sees 
them can judge very accurately whether they are all 
right. But the man who buys an orchard of fruit trees 
can’t look into them and tell what they are; he buys out 
of confidence in the seller. And his investment lias to 
continue for some years in the case of fruit-trees, until 
he does know what he has bought, he must invest in land 
or the value of its use; the preparation of the ground; 
the planting, pruning, spraying and cultivation of the 
trees until at length they come into bearing. Ilis invest¬ 
ment, during those years, becomes many times the orig¬ 
inal cost of the trees. Therefore, in buying trees and 
plants, their very nature makes it necessary for the buyer 
to place great confidence in the grower. So I say our re¬ 
sponsibility is greater because the degree of confidence 
must be greater. Sometimes that confidence is misplaced 
and they are the cases that find ready space for publicity 
while the many thousands of properly and satisfactorily 
filled orders are not advertised in the same way. It is not 
surprising that in an industry representing an annual 
turn-over of $30,000,000 and in which hundreds of thou¬ 
sands of orders are filled in the short space of the fall and 
spring season, some errors should occur. Nor is it strange 
that actual imposition is not unknown in the nursery bus¬ 
iness and in other lines. And that is what we purpose to 
try to eliminate. 
Now taking that stand and making the Association the 
partner of those who buy goods of any of our members, 
we feel that they and we are both entitled to have that 
fact known. And so we have just placed contracts for a 
series of advertisements to tell the public what the 
American Association of Nurserymen stands for; how 
our members are held to the observance of rules of fair¬ 
dealing; and how we have provided for the public to get 
what we promise them. We assume no “holier than thou” 
attitude; we realize that there are firms outside our ranks 
that are of unquestioned standing and responsibility; we 
take our stand for fair-dealing and ask others to stand 
with us. 
That, to my mind, is the most outstanding fact in 
American horticulture today. We want it to benefit the 
buyers of trees and plants; we know it will. We are hu¬ 
man enough to want it to benefit us, too. We think the 
public demand what we are doing; and we are doing it 
as careful, thoughtful, business men meeting a situation 
that we have no wish to evade. Every business trans¬ 
action affects two parties; those immediately at interest; 
but it affects also the general public. The business of 
every nurseryman affects the Association and all its 
members. We simply take note of that and do the ob¬ 
vious thing. That is all. And yet it means a great change. 
It is not revolutionary. To some, all change is revolution; 
Ibis is merely the evolution of business standards follow¬ 
ing the lead of other lines. 
Maybe we have been slow to heed the demand. We ad¬ 
mit that. But when you come to think of it, we are til¬ 
lers of the soil; and the psychology of it lies in the fact 
that when you dig, you look downward; our view is lim¬ 
ited; we fail to get the broad vision and the sweep of dis¬ 
tance. Notice “The Angelus” and “The Man With The 
Iloe;” they look down; every artist has painted that 
thought. The trouble with us is that we have kept our 
eyes upon our work and have failed to note what was 
passing around us; we lacked perspective and we have 
concerned ourselves too much with what we have con¬ 
sidered our own affairs; but our affairs are not alone the 
things we are doing or the way we do them, but also the 
work and the methods of all others in the trade. And that 
isolation and non-intervention have encouraged some 
methods that have been bad. Good firms whose own 
methods have been above reproach, have been none the 
less responsible for things that have brought reproach 
upon us through their failure to protest and in an effec¬ 
tive way when that was proper and necessary. We re¬ 
cognize that responsibility and purpose not only to trade 
fairly, but to insist that those associated with us do so 
and that those of whom we buy and to whom we sell, so 
conduct their affairs as not to discredit the industry that 
means our livelihood, the work to which we give our 
lives, and the standing of the business from which we 
take our position in the community. 
We who are all connected with the growth and sale 
and use of trees and plants and flowers and seeds have 
so many interests in common that our relations should 
be closer. It was very kind of you to invite our Associa¬ 
tion to send a representative to this meeting; I hope it 
serves us to state our position frankly to you; and I cer¬ 
tainly hope it will serve you to know what we do stand 
for. I should like to see your representatives in our own 
meetings and to have you tell us your problems where 
they touch our lines. We must not be so engrossed in the 
thing at hand as to overlook opportunity for cooperation 
with those who may be equally interested with us. There 
is, for example, a great exchange of business between 
us; you florists and gardeners are buyers of some of the 
things we grow and apparently you will presently be al¬ 
together dependent upon home products. It should ad¬ 
vantage you to know what we have and how we are 
growing it; and it would surely serve us to know what 
else you wish us to grow for you. And in that particular, 
we are lame. We started growing some things at first 
because they were easily to be had; and we have con¬ 
tinued to grow them for the same reason that we started; 
and having them, we strive to sell them. And yet many 
of the fruits we grow might profitably be discarded and 
our lists improved by limiting them to the best varieties. 
In the case of our ornamentals, particularly deciduous 
