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.

As said above, it would be possible to advise some modifications in the above classification by adapting certain areas to somewhat different types of treatment than those which we conceive to have been intended, and thereby diminish the cost of maintenance; but, to put our opinion broadly, if you had available a sum of money producing annually an income three times that which is now spent for maintenance, we should advise putting practically all of that sum into a maintenance endowment rather than invest any of it in new “improvements” at the expense of continued deficiency in the maintenance budget.

To put the matter in dollars and cents, we think the most urgent need for the improvement of the grounds is an increase in the annual maintenance budget for gardeners, laborers, watchmen, foremen, supplies (including manure), tools, equipment, etc., from the present figure of about $70,000 to about $200,000 with a further gradual increase in connection with any new improvements or changes in conditions of use or in labor conditions, which may tend to increase the maintenance burden.

Appendix A gives some comparative figures of maintenance labor and maintenance costs, which we have used in arriving at our tentative conclusions of this subject.

We see no signs whatever of such a flocking of capable men into the ranks of gardeners and gardening laborers in America as would tend to lower the costs of such work as compared with the costs of all the other things that money buys. If anything, the tendency seems likely to be the other way, as it has been for some time in the past. The private individual can and does “pull in his horns” on the matter of gardening maintenance, by having less of that sort of thing to maintain in proportion to what he has of the other conveniences and amenities of life, as the latter become relatively less costly than gardening. The Botanical Garden, as a specialized institution, if it is to do its job well, has got to meet the increased cost of the most essential part of its function without sacrifice of quality. Otherwise it is manifestly failing as a Garden, however useful it may be in other respects.

But whatever program you adopt as to increase of maintenance funds, it seems likely that the increase will come only by degrees and that a serious deficiency must be faced for some time to come.

One of the great difficulties of such a condition is the temptation to yield first to an impulse that would rob Peter to pay Paul and then to an impulse that would in desperation reverse the process when it is seen that Peter also is starving. It is very hard to adhere to a well-balanced and self-consistent policy of maintenance when confronted by insufficient means at every turn, but it is even more important under these circumstances than when no part of the work is in serious danger of starvation.

As a help toward a consistent and well-balanced distribution of maintenance funds we would urge a deliberate classification of the Garden lands for maintenance purposes, along the lines of our rough preliminary classification but much more carefully studied, and a correspondingly deliberate and systematic apportionment of the available resources for maintenance to the several classes of lands. The emphasis, of course, should not be upon a meticulously detailed cost-accounting and rigid adherence to budget allotments. Emergencies frequently arise which require shifts, as when infections arise that need to be promptly suppressed at the cost of almost any postponement of routine work. And it is proper here to point out, as a parenthesis, that we have observed in the Garden some such infections, notably of scales, which no well-conducted commercial establishment would have permitted to go as far as they have gone. If the infected plants could not have been cured with the means available, they would have been destroyed and burned.

The emphasis in the maintenance budgeting should rather be upon a general continuity of policy in treating each parcel of land year after year with about the same degree of economy in relation to other parcels, unless and until convincing reasons appear for deliberately changing its classification.

But in addition to this general classification, we strongly advise the deliberate selection within each class of lands of one or more preferential areas, no matter how small, which shall be kept up thoroughly well as samples of what would be done throughout all the areas of that class if funds permitted, leaving the rest of the lands in that class to be kept up only as well as the funds permit after taking care of these small samples perfectly.

The reasons for such a policy are two-fold. In the first place, it will show the public what can be done with adequate maintenance funds; and by the very sharpness of the contrast between these samples of first-rate maintenance in each class and the conditions which poverty enforces elsewhere in that class of lands, will stimulate increased financial support. In the second place, it will be of great value in building up and maintaining the ideals of the maintenance force itself. Where, because of poverty, almost nothing is thoroughly well done of its kind, where nearly every job is left half-finished because of the necessity of taking a few stitches somewhere else, not only is there much waste of effort--the sort of waste inseparable from poverty--but also there is bound to be a tendency to demoralization of the maintenance force itself, a lowering of its standards and ideals, an acceptance of enforced low standards as good enough, a loss of the priceless stimulus of pride and shame, of esprit de corps.

In addition to such suggestions for improvement of the mechanism of maintenance, we would urge the importance of placing the responsibility, under the Director-in-Chief, for the maintenance of grounds and for those cumulative improvements in detail which are inseparable from maintenance, upon some one first-class superintendent having the necessary technical skill and ideals, and the peculiar qualities needed by one who is to be at once a good executive and leader in his own department, a loyal subordinate to the Director-in-Chief, and a sympathetic collaborator with other specialists. Perhaps you have in your present personnel the man for such a position. Perhaps you need to look outside. But obviously a first-class man in such a position is of the greatest importance, especially during a period of building up the gardening and maintenance force and improving its work.