Plantarium

In Yonkers, N. Y., on the banks of the broad Hudson, is the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research. Since last autumn the Institute's scientists and technicians have been at work on a greenhouse heated & lighted by electric lamps. Last week Director William Crocker announced that the electric greenhouse was no longer a hopeful experiment but a successful fact.

The greenhouse, 19 x 8 ft., has insulating walls consisting of two iron sheets with the 6-in. space between them filled by tightly packed sawdust. Only the south side of its roof is of glass. Heat & light are provided by ten 500-watt lamps which hang close over the plants in double rows and can be raised as the plants grow higher. A thermostat turns on the lights if the temperature drops below 62DEG, turns them off at 68DEG. Even a little sunshine keeps the insulated structure warm enough to keep the lights off. On the average, the plants receive about four hours of artificial illumination per day. Under this regime it was found that fuchsias, snapdragons, begonias, sweet peas and calceolarias bloom from two to six weeks sooner than in steam-heated greenhouses.

The greenhouse was designed by Dr. John Morris Arthur, who last week indulged in a bit of Utopian prophecy: "This new machine will let the suburban householder plug in his greenhouse just as he plugs in his vacuum cleaner. It is almost foolproof in operation and all he will have to do is tend to his plants."

The Institute was established eleven years ago by the late Colonel William Boyce Thompson, copper tycoon, yachtsman, good friend of Roosevelt I. A Red Cross mission to Russia which he headed and helped pay for had taught him the importance of food crops. His interest in ornamental plants was aroused when he came to select trees, shrubs and flowers for his 30-acre estate on the Hudson. Meditating the Rockefeller millions assigned to ameliorate and prolong human life, he decided to set up a station for studying the fundamental hows & whys of plant behavior. When Colonel Thompson died in 1930, he had given the Institute some $10,000,000, more than a third of his fortune, and made it the best-equipped plant research centre in the world. Currently the endowment is valued at some $10,000,000.

One of the first discoveries, of incalculable value to farmers, was that seeds sprout most quickly if kept cold (41DEG) and dry between harvest and planting. Others followed in slow but steady succession. Some kinds of apples with green-colored skins may be just as ripe and tasty as red apples but suffer in market competition because buyers like the appearance of red apples. It was learned that 48 hours of ultraviolet radiation turns green-colored apples a beautiful, even, overall shade of red.

After trying 224 chemicals, Dr. Frank Earl Denny discovered that potatoes treated with ethylene chlorohydrin vapor flung up 2-ft. vines and began to bear before untreated potatoes showed above ground. Now Southern potato growers using this medication on hardy plants from the North can collect two crops a year.

The mysterious "mosaic disease" or "yellows" which attacks peach trees, tobacco, sugar cane, cucumbers, potatoes, tomatoes, lettuce, spinach, corn, sugar beets, asters, dahlias et al. was found by Dr. Louis Otto Kunkel to be carried from plant to plant by a small insect called the leafhopper. Dr. Kunkel also discovered that the leafhopper very rarely flew more than three or four feet above the earth. Obvious leafhopper foil: a 4-ft. screen fence. In early autumn a plot of asters thus protected was only 20% diseased whereas 80% of the flowers just outside the fence were damaged. Last week Dr. Kunkel, now on the Rockefeller Institute staff, reported to a meeting of bacteriologists, pathologists and immunologists in Manhattan that plants which recover from mosaic disease are thenceforth immune just as are humans who recover from smallpox, that cuttings from such recovered plants, when grafted to other plants convey the immunity to their hosts.

Flower growers have learned to their sorrow that a little illuminating gas leaking into their greenhouses will wither their sturdiest blooms. Director Crocker noted that tomato plants are so sensitive that they will droop in the presence of one part of gas to 100,000 of air. He advised growers to keep a tomato plant in their greenhouses to serve as a sentinel, give warning of gas in time to save the flowers.

The Institute has an $1,800 triangular quartz prism for studying the effect on plants of various wavelengths of light. Another equipment item is a huge, mobile frame, shaped like a dirigible hangar carrying powerful lights in the roof. It can be wheeled over a greenhouse to observe plant behavior under continuous 24-hour illumination. It has been learned that barley, cabbage and clover subjected to such treatment keep on growing 24 hours a day but that tomato plants quit, light or no light, and rest five to seven hours.

In Yonkers the Institute has a big headquarters building, some 25 greenhouses nine acres of outdoor planting. It has a small farm in the Saw Mill River Valley, a large nursery and arboretum at Spring Valley. The staff comprises 30 to 35 scientists, six stenographers, 20 engineers and technicians, three librarians who care for 20,000 reference books and 10,000 pamphlets, three photographers who keep a pictorial record of the work and make motion pictures of sunflowers "waking up" at midnight, of plants wobbling drunkenly as they recover from gas anesthesia.

When Founder Thompson had pondered his idea and found it good, he invited botanists all over the U. S. to submit their own ideas of how such an institute should be run and what it should try to do. Dr Crocker, then at the University of Chicago, submitted the plans that looked best to Col. Thompson, was hired forthwith, spent three years studying research methods at home and abroad before opening the Institute. His staff likes him because he does not isolate projects but encourages entomologist, botanist, physical chemist and mathematician to get their heads together. He gives some one absolute charge of every enterprise, however, and holds that one responsible, avoids interfering, keeps close tabs. Nominally Dr. Crocker himself is responsible to a board of ten trustees on which sit Col. Thompson's widow, his daughter, who is Mrs. Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle Jr., Frederick Hudson Ecker (Metropolitan Life) and Morgan Partner Thomas W. Lamont. Actually Dr. Crocker and Trustee-Business Manager Fred Pope, onetime Thompson employe, submit an annual budget which the board passes without too hard study.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.