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.