Botanic Director

GEORGE S. AVERY '24 runs an oasis for plants and people in the midst of a cement city. He is Director of Brooklyn's Botanic Garden, the 50 busiest garden acres in the world and the fourth most-visited attraction in New York City.

"The great social challenge," as Avery sees it, "is to transform those who once were needed for menial unthinking labor into thinking, knowledge-gathering and beauty-appreciating human beings, people to whom an inspirational environment for living is as important as three meals a day."

His interest in people's growth is on a par with his interest in plant growth. "There need be no poverty of mind," Avery claims. And the 8000 plant varieties in the 56-year-old Garden enrich more than 4½ million visitors annually, explained partly by the fact that one in every twenty people in the United States lives within twenty miles of Brooklyn.

He describes the Garden as "a private enterprise in full partnership with the City of New York." Half its support comes from the City, half from private donors. Several recent gifts have been made to establish short-term fellowships in the Garden's Department of Instruction.

Avery has been called "an outstanding plant physiologist." Although he actually finished his B.S. at Tulane, he returned to Dartmouth for his M.S. and received his Ph.D. in 1927 at the University of Wisconsin. He has been a research fellow at Columbia and a foreign fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation, has taught at Duke and Connecticut College, and directed the Connecticut Arboretum.

His qualifications are matched by his enthusiasm. Since 1944 when he became Director, the Garden has acquired three "outreach stations," natural conservation areas of 223, 200, and 14 acres, and the Kitchawan Research Laboratory located on the 223-acre field station on the shores of the City's Croton Reservoir. Twenty scientists work at Kitchawan.

The ten individual gardens within the Garden require care by almost 40 gardeners. There's a Children's Garden where some 400 city kids come each summer to raise crops and then bring home their harvest, a Rose Garden with 700 varieties, a Japanese Garden and Shinto Shrine, an Elizabethan Garden of kitchen herbs. Among the most recently developed (1955) is a Fragrance Garden for the blind whose Braille markers invite visitors to "Please Touch the Flowers."

Some 23,000 persons took advantage of the popularlevel classes offered at the Garden last year by a teaching staff of about 25. Bonsai, the ancient Japanese art of dwarfing and potting trees (Avery's specialty), was one of the best attended. He is pleased that plant lovers from as far south as New Orleans and west of the Mississippi time their annual visits to New York to coincide with the oneday, all-day Bonsai classes.

The Garden has a large Bonsai collection under the care of a Japanese expert and publishes a handbook on the art - just one of over 50 Botanic Garden handbooks. They also publish a quarterly, Plants & Gardens.

Avery travels to view other collections. On a trip to Japan he asked a native gardener where he could see the best selection of cherry trees. He was directed back to his own country to see the "Blookryn Botanic Garden."