ISHS Acta Horticulturae 299: Forum on Strategies for Horticultural Societies in the 1990's, XXIII IHC
PLANT SOCIETIES ARE MORE THAN HORTICULTURAL SCIENCE |
| Author: | H.B. Tukey Jr |
| Abstract:
Most of the presentations in this symposium refer to national and international professional societies in horticultural science. But when I talk about plant societies, I am referring to the great number of diverse groups and organizations that are associated with horticulture but with programs, goals, and memberships of their own. These plant societies have a great influence on scientific horticulture, and they look to the horticultural scientist for expertise, cooperation, and assistance. We would do well to know them better. Horticultural science is one of the few academic disciplines that deals not only with its own agenda of science and research, but with the agenda of people, organizations, agencies, and societies that are associated with horticulture in some way. These people and their groups are large in number, diverse in skills and abilities, and equally diverse in their aims and goals. They include professional horticultural managers, such as landscape contractors, landscape maintenance managers, nurserymen and growers of horticultural plants; managers of street trees such as municipal arborists, electric utility companies, State and Federal foresters, urban foresters, and individual commercial arborists; and horticulturists interested in a particular plant or group of plants as a hobby interest. There are design professionals and land managers such as developers, city and county planners, contractors, landscape architects, and those groups and professions which use the services of these professionals. There are the sales and service industries which support horticulture - greenhouse supplies, pesticides, insurance, banking, tools and equipment; professional educators in universities and colleges, in two-year professional schools, in high schools and vocational programs, and the Cooperative Extension system of the United States Federal Government; and managers of botanical gardens and arboreta with their programs of plant collection, curation, interpretation, and conservation, and other museums which use horticulture and plants in their programs of interpretive enrichment. We include the so called environmental groups - Audubon Society, Sierra Club, Nature Conservancy - with which horticulture has much in common. There are individual horticulturists - the home gardener, grower, retail flower shop owner, indoor plant specialist, nursery salesperson, and the vast numbers of people who have a cactus on the window sill, an aloe in the kitchen, or a few geraniums on the front porch. When one considers all these people and the groups to which they belong, all interested in horticulture in some way, all interested in learning more, all taking their knowledge to their work and their church and their schools and into their politics - one begins to get a true sense of the importance of horticulture societies in the broadest sense. In the Puget Sound region surrounding Seattle, upwards of 500 of these plant societies have their own membership, their own educational programs, conduct their own public information efforts, and have their particular political and social agendas. Think beyond | |
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