Facts and Statistics for Gardeners

Facts, Research, Surveys, Trivia, Information

Quotes ... Links ... References

Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo

From the Spirit of Gardening Website

"It is difficult to place a monetary value on the many vital services that trees provide.
However, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection calculates that a single
tree that lives for fifty years will contribute service worth nearly $200,000 (in 1994 dollars)
to the community during its lifetime. This includes providing oxygen ($31,250), recycling
water and regulating humidity ($37,000), controlling air pollution ($62,500), producing
protein ($2,500), providing shelter for wildlife ($31,250), and controlling land
erosion and fertilizing the soil ($31,250)."
- Sacred Trees

"Home would not be home to me without a lawn, and if there are,
as I've recently read, twenty-five million home lawns in the United States,
at least fifty million other Americans must agree with me."
- Katharine S. White, Onward and Upward in the Garden, 1979

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"Trees can reduce utility bills (air conditioning in summer, heating in winter) when planted properly:
Heating: Using trees as windbreaks allows savings of 10% - 20%.
Cooling: Shading windows and walls can lower AC costs by 25% - 50%."
The Benefits of Planting Trees

A research project in Australia, entitled "The Congruent Garden: an
Investigation into the Role of the Domestic Garden in Satisfying
Fundamental Human Needs," interviewed gardeners on the values of
gardening in their everyday lives. The researcher, Mike Steven,
established that gardens have the potential to satisfy nine basic human
needs (subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation,
leisure, creation, identity, freedom) across four existential states
(being, having, doing and interacting.)
- Mike Steven, Lecturer in Landscape Studies,
University of Westen Sydney, Australia

The amount of money spent by Americans on lawn care annually: $6 billion.
- Warren Schultz, The Chemical Free Lawn

"A well maintained landscape with mature trees can increase property values up to
25 percent. Trees can cool houses in the summer. A city lot with 30 percent plant cover
provides the equivalent cooling necessary to air condition two moderately sized
houses 12 hours a day in the summer."
The Value of Trees Around Your Home.

"Thousands and thousands of acres in the United States are being sprayed
annually with nearly 50 million pounds of Roundup, a broad-spectrum
herbicide designed to kill any plant it hits, unless the plant has been
genetically altered to tolerate the chemical. Roundup has accounted
for half of Monsanto's corporate profits in recent years."
- Organic Gardening, July-August 1999, p. 8

An agricultural adage says the tiny animals that live below the
surface of a healthy pasture weigh more than the cows grazing
above it. In a catalogue selling composting equipment I read
that two handfuls of healthy soil contain more living organisms
than there are people on the earth. What these beings are and
what they can be doing is difficult to even begin to comprehend,
but it helps to realize that even thought they are many,
they work as one.
- Carol Williams, Bringing a Garden to Life, 1998

Basic Facts About Agriculture in the United States

	1900	1930	1960	1990
Total Population	76,000,000	122,775,000	180,000,000	246,081,000
Farm Population	29,400,000	30,455,000	15,600,000	4,591,000
Farmers Percent of Labor Force	38%	21%	8.3%	2.6%
Number of Farms	5,740,000	6,295,000	3,711,000	2,143,000
Irrigated Farm Acres		14,633,000	33,800,000	46,386,000
Average Acerage of U.S. Farm	147	157	303	461

USDA. History of American Agriculture, 1776-2000

Perhaps not since the fall of Babylon have so many city dwellers wanted to "return"
to the country without ever having been there in the first place.
- Richard W. Langer

Farming is among the top ten most dangerous occupations. More than 1000
individuals lose their lives each year due to farm accidents. In 1995, there were
130,000 agricultural workers injured, and approximately half
of these injuries were permanent.
- Stanley Wise, The Wise Farmer

It has taken biologists some 230 years to identify and describe three
quarters of a million insects; if there are indeed at least thirty million,
as Erwin (Terry Erwin, the Smithsonian Institute) estimates, then,
working as they have in the past, insect taxonomists have ten thousand
years of employment ahead of them. Ghilean Prance, director of the
Botanical Gardens in Kew, estimates that a complete list of plants
in the Americas would occupy taxonomists for four centuries, again
working at historical rates.
- Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, The Sixth Extinction, p. 122

An estimated 63 million people are feeding birds in their yards. Research by
Metz Farms Wildlife Feeding Specialists of Grand Rapids, Michigan, also shows that
$2.3 billion is spent on birdseed each year.
- Report

Gardeners have to be a combined chemist, botanist and meteorologist
to carry all such information in one's head and be able to send it forth
when visitors pose embarrassing questions.
- Dr. E.J. Salisbury

Nearly 97% of the world's water is salty or otherwise undrinkable.
Another 2% is locked in ice caps and glaciers. Only 1% can be used
for all agricultural, residential, manufacturing, community and personal needs.
- Drinking Water Week

An estimated 2.3 billion people worldwide face water shortages.
- United Nations

Water - Quotes for Gardeners

Mark Henry, Ph.D., Clemson University economist, conducted two studies on how the
quality of landscaping effects the market values of single family homes in South Carolina.
Dr. Henry concluded that improving the quality of the landscaping from average to
excellent would raise your home's value by 10%.

Strange But True Facts Pertinent to Gardeners
- Gardener's Paradise

Pick up a pinecone and count the spiral rows of scales. You may find eight
spirals winding up to the left and 13 spirals winding up to the right, or 13 left
and 21 right spirals, or other pairs of numbers. The striking fact is that these
pairs of numbers are adjacent numbers in the famous Fibonacci series:
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21... Here, each term is the sum of the previous two terms.
The phenomenon is well known and called phyllotaxis. Many are the efforts
of biologists to understand why pinecones, sunflowers, and many other plants
exhibit this remarkable pattern.
- Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe, p. 151

A callused palm and dirty fingernails precede a Green Thumb.
Wishes are like seeds, few ever develop into something.
Sitting in a garden and doing nothing is high art everywhere.
Beauty is the Mistress, the gardener Her slave.
When all the chores are done, the avid gardener will invent some new ones.
Where are the fig blossoms? Exceptions to every rule.
Only two percent of all insects are harmful. Why are they all in my garden?
The joyful gardener is evidence of an incarnation.
To dig is to discover.
- Michael P. Garofalo, Pulling Onions

Agriculture is the main human activity on Earth and the principle
influence on our planet's ecology. Over half of the inhabitants
of our planet are farmers."
- Mark Ritchie

Human beings are made up mostly of water, in roughly the same percentage
as water is to the surface of the earth. Our tissues and membranes, our brains
and hearts, our sweat and tears--all reflect the same recipe for life, in which
efficient use is made of those ingredients available on the surface of the earth.
We are 23 percent carbon, 2.6 percent nitrogen, 1.4 percent calcium, 1.1 percent phosphorous, with tiny amounts of roughly three dozen other elements. But above
all we are oxygen (61 percent) and hydrogen (10 percent), fused together in the
unique molecular combination known as water, which makes up 71 percent
of the human body.
- Al Gore, Earth in the Balance