REPORT
ON
THE NEW YORK BOTANICAL
GARDEN
BY
OLMSTED BROTHERS
1924
NEW YORK
1924
CONTENTS
PAGE
Introduction 5
Part I. Maintenance of grounds 6
Part II. Improvements closely associated with maintenance;
the making of existing features better of their kind 11
1. Fruticetum 12
2. Herbaceous grounds 12
3. Border plantations 13
4. Cherry Garden 13
5. Means of circulation as related to the improvement of existing
plantations 13
6. Qualities generally to be sought in improving the vegetation
through better maintenance 16
Part III. Improvements constituting new departures and substantially
independent of Parts IV and V 17
1. Rhododendron Glade 17
2. Model Gardens 18
3. Iris Garden region 20
4. Landscape Garden 21
Part IV. Automobile through-traffic 25
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[1] 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.
[1] 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
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.