Report on the New York Botanical Garden

Part V. Vicinity of the Museum 32

In conclusion 39

Appendix A 41

Appendix B 44

Resolution of the Board of Managers 47

Index 49

REPORT ON

THE NEW YORK BOTANICAL GARDEN

August, 1924

DR. FREDERIC S. LEE, President, Board of Managers, New York Botanical Garden, New York City.

DEAR SIR:

This Report is submitted at your request to set forth the results to date of our investigation and study of the grounds of the Botanical Garden, as a basis for comprehensive plans for their improvement. It is a revision, in the light of further discussion and study, of a preliminary report, made in December, 1923.

The reading of this Report will be facilitated by consulting Maps A and B, which follow the text.

This investigation was set on foot because of an impression, voiced in your Statement of April, 1923, that the grounds of the Botanical Garden are much less beautiful and much less attractive and valuable to the general public, and especially to that part of the public particularly interested in gardening, in gardens and in landscape beauty, than is reasonably to be expected in the leading institution of its kind in the metropolis of the United States.

Our investigation has emphatically confirmed this impression, has defined its particulars in many respects, and has begun to make clear the means by which this condition can best be changed to a really satisfactory one.

For the purpose of this Report the defects can best be considered incidentally and in connection with the probable means of overcoming them by positive constructive measures directed toward making the Garden by degrees more and more excellent, on the assumption that means can be found to carry forward such progressive improvement in an orderly, well-balanced and reasonably rapid way without any arbitrary limit on the extent of the improvement.

As already indicated, this Report is to be regarded as a progress report, as a step toward the adoption of a general program in accordance with which definite plans for improvement may be successively elaborated in the necessary degree of detail.

It will be convenient to group what we have to say under the following five main headings:

I. Maintenance of grounds. Pages 6-11.

II. Improvements closely associated with maintenance; the making of existing features better of their kind. Pages 11-17.

III. Improvements which would constitute new departures (the introduction of distinctly new features), so far as not dependent on the questions considered under the two remaining heads. Pages 17-24.

IV. Questions of automobile through-traffic or park traffic and of park uses distinct from and more or less conflicting with Botanical Garden uses as such; of possible restrictions on the right of the public to enter upon all parts of the grounds at all times of day and night; and of related matters. Pages 25-31.

V. The vicinity of the Museum and various other questions dependent upon that and upon the questions discussed under heading IV. Pages 32-39.

PART I. Maintenance of Grounds

MAINTENANCE OF GROUNDS

The basic need in the improvement of the grounds, without meeting which other improvements will be nugatory, wasteful and transitory in effect, is that of greatly increasing the quantity and quality of maintenance--involving a correspondingly large increase in the annual expenditure for maintenance.

This matter is so fundamental and the manner in which the possibilities of annual maintenance control all other decisions is so direct and so far-reaching, that it seems necessary to discuss it at some length and attempt to gauge, at least in a general way, the cost of adequate and economical maintenance.

Maintenance may be made in any given case so costly as to be uneconomical; but it should be noted at the start that inadequate maintenance is always uneconomical in that it involves progressive depreciation of the capital investment. In the case of a botanical garden or a park, where the real values derived from the investment are largely dependent on the cumulative effect of the growth of plants in certain ways over long periods of years, the effect of inadequate or ill-directed maintenance is peculiarly disastrous because the resulting depreciation (or failure to secure legitimate increase of value) can never be offset in short order by liberal investment in repairs and improvements, as can generally be done with buildings and engineering works. There is absolutely no other road to first-rate results than by the process of slow natural growth under the selective control, protection and guidance of suitable methods of maintenance year after year.

The kind, amount and cost of maintenance of grounds necessary to keep on the safe side of the border which separates cumulative advance in values from progressive deterioration depend mainly on three sets of factors. One obviously is the efficiency and cost of labor and the skill with which it is directed. A second includes the inherent advantages and disadvantages of the site and of external or otherwise largely uncontrollable conditions--such factors as soil, climate, atmospheric impurities, and the habits of the people who resort to the grounds. But normally it is the third set which accounts for the greatest variations in the cost of adequate maintenance. These are the variations in what might be called types of landscape treatment, such as:

(a) Established native woodlands, where there is an approach toward the self-maintaining equilibrium of a mature natural forest.

(b) Areas in which mixed ground-covers of herbaceous or woody plants, or both, while never quite attaining a permanent natural equilibrium, such as characterizes many forest floors and many marshes, can be kept in satisfactory condition by wholesale methods, as, for example, by infrequent scything and a limited amount of hand weeding.

(c) Broad areas of simple lawn or meadow, little interrupted by trees or other obstacles, where the main item of maintenance cost is periodic wholesale cutting by horse or power mowers.

(d) Intricate combinations of turf with plantations and other obstacles, requiring frequent hand mowing under difficult conditions and involving hand cultivation, weeding, and other control of the interspersed plantations.

(e) Areas of a sort requiring still more intensive gardening operations to secure and maintain the results at which they are aimed.

Other things being equal, the above indicated variations in type of grounds ordinarily account for a range in the amount of labor required for suitable maintenance, varying from a maximum of about one man per year for each acre or less in type “e,” to a minimum of one man for each twenty acres or more, type “b;” with the possibility of an almost indefinite reduction of maintenance labor in type “a,” in those cases where intensive human use does not enter in to upset the balance and require special counteractive measures.

We have attempted roughly to classify the lands of the Botanical Garden according to the types of landscape treatment as affecting maintenance costs; grouping them in three classes:

Class 1

²⁄₃ to 2 acres per man, as in type “e” and part of type “d.”

Class 2

2 to 6 acres per man, as in part of type “d” and in type “c.”

Class 3

6 to 18 acres per man, as in type “b.”

Note: As will be seen, the first class would be likely to require on the average about three times as much labor per acre as the second, and the second about three times as much per acre as the third.

This classification is not based primarily on the amount of maintenance labor now applied to the several areas in the Botanical Garden, because that is manifestly (but in widely varying degree) insufficient for properly maintaining the sort of treatment which appears to have been attempted. Neither is it based on an arbitrary assumption of our own as to what conditions it would be ideally desirable to create and maintain on each area.

We recognize that your own organization has in the past “bit off” more than it is able properly to “chew” under present conditions of cost and of funds available for maintenance; and our classification of areas was based on what each area was apparently intended to be. Knowing from experience elsewhere about how much labor is apt to be required for maintaining various types of landscape treatment in reasonably good condition under reasonably efficient and skilful management, we have thus arrived at a rough estimate of the amount of labor which would be required to maintain properly what you have already “bit off.”

This is a starting-point for all the rest of our discussion. Obviously by abandoning some of the things already attempted which are relatively costly of maintenance, thus transferring some areas from a more costly to a less costly classification, our estimates could be cut without sacrifice of quality in the maintenance of each kind of area. And, on the other hand, any addition of new features tending to raise any piece of land from a cheaper maintenance type to a more costly maintenance type would call for a corresponding increase in the maintenance force.

Taking the Botanical Garden as it is, then, and assuming the proper upkeep of the sort of thing that appears to have been intended and attempted, we believe the maintenance force necessary for adequate care of what now exists should be about 110 men, which is about 2¹⁄₂ times as many as are now employed.

Continue reading Report on the New York Botanical Garden free in the Wunder reader →