Horticulture, Horticultural Science, and 100 Years of ASHS

Abstract

subject to change.The process is cumulative and science is alive only when it grows.When any society claims to know the complete truth such that further question is heresy, science dies.Horticultural knowledge accumulation has always been in a state of tension between the mundane empiricism of the gardening arts discovered by generations of growers in contrast to information generated by scientists, often academics, sometimes indifferent to the uses of their discoveries and often obsessed by the irrelevant.In the 1900s, horticultural science was considered an oxymoron.One hundred years later, we are a Society that rejects this taunt and have demonstrated that horticultural science is a truly humanistic plant science, concerned with all information relevant to the interaction of humans and the plants that serve them.Our goal is the betterment of humankind.Throughout this paper, we will discuss a number of significant advancements in science that have been made by horticulturists or by plant scientists using horticultural plants and later applied to agriculture and other fields.For example, Gregor Mendel s groundbreaking discovery of the principles of heredity in a monastery garden led to what might be considered the most important scientific revolution in modern times: the flow of genetic information from generation to generation.Photoperiodic effects on plant growth, first reported by W.W. Garner and H.A. Allard on a number of horticultural crops in 1920, set the stage for understanding the relationship between crop production, light, and temperature.Fieldlevel photosynthetic rates were first measured by A.J. Heinicke and N.F.Childers in the 1930s using an apple-tree model.These concepts were later applied to many agricultural and ecological situations to evaluate carbon dioxide fixation and photosynthetic rates.L.R. Jones and J.C. Walker developed the concept of genetic control of plant disease resistance in their work with cabbage, leading to widespread efforts to use breeding techniques to obtain host plant resistance.H.A. Jones and A.F. Clarke discovered the cytoplasmic-genic system of hybrid seed production in onion, which revolutionized in F1 hybrid crop development.Particleacceleration technology, in which DNA is blasted into plant tissue in order to produce transgenic plant cells, was invented by the horticulturist John Sanford in 1987.Few scientific fields have captured the imagination as has horticulture, perhaps because of its centrality to the development of human culture.Biblical and other religious texts are filled with horticultural metaphors, such as the placement of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden near the Tree of Knowledge, the olive branch as a symbol for peace, and Noah s cultivation of a vineyard as his first act after the flood.We speak of a renaissance in events as a flowering and the end of innocence as a deflowering.The education of our youth involves, appropriately, a garden of children, or kindergarten.We cultivate relationships and speak of our hard work bearing fruit, certain people as late bloomers, or others as wall flowers, or worse, gone-to-seed.Moving to a different location marks us as transplants, but staying put means we are putting down roots.Many of our best thinkers have communicated complex concepts with such horticultural metaphors.Charles Darwin used the branching tree in describing the process of evolution in nature.In his vision, the branches represent phylogenetic patterns of lineage, and the dropped branches and twigs represent extinction.This tree metaphor for what Darwin called descent with modification has completely permeated biological science and popular culture.Horticulture and its practices are woven into our consciousness and have become part of the fabric of our language and thought.

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