HOME HELP FEEDBACK SUBSCRIPTIONS ARCHIVE SEARCH TABLE OF CONTENTS		QUICK SEARCH:   [advanced] Author: Keyword(s): Year:  Vol:  Page:

This Article Full Text (PDF) Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Skinner, H. T. Search for Related Content PubMed Articles by Skinner, H. T. Agricola Articles by Skinner, H. T.

Agriculture's Contribution to Open Space and Natural Beauty¹

ABSTRACT

In addition to the economic, recreational, or conservation values of open spaces of our rural and urban landscapes, we can no longer afford to ignore the factors of esthetics. As an item of increasing public concern, esthetics pegs open spaces at values which call for new methods of prediction and calculation. A major element of open space, of natural beauty, and of esthetics, is plant life: the trees, shrubs, and groundcovers of the hillside, the home lot, and the city street.

A review of plant cultural problems, especially problems of the artificial urban environment, points up need for discovering superior plants or for breeding improved ones. Improvements involve upgraded quality for esthetic effect, adaptability to man-made environments, but especially the increase of resistance to pests of diverse kinds and to pollutants of the air and soil. A recently "remade" London plane (Platanus acerifolia) or sycamore (Platanus) tree, likely to be both pest- and pollution-resistant, provides an example of manufactured plants of this sort.

An urgent need of the 1970's is for the development of workable programs designed to preserve and protect the total values of the countryside—agricultural, conservation, scenic, and recreational—on a countywide, statewide, and nationwide basis. Within these objectives, the environmentalist is concerned for the threatened species of animals and plants. But our concern should go further. Within the species, it is the variant individual which can become immensely valuable as genetic studies progress, and which, when identifiable, should not be lost.

¹ Paper presented Dec. 28–29, 1970, in Chicago, Ill., at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Section "O" Agriculture Symposium on "Agriculture and the Quality of the Environment in the Seventies."

² Director, US National Arboretum, Crops Research Division, ARS, USDA, Washington, D. C. 20002.