Decline
Arboretum staff did their best given their limited knowledge of the art of bonsai, but the Larz Anderson Collection suffered from the lack of expert skills needed to keep the fragile trees healthy. The practice of annually forcing them into early growth for the spring flower show of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society contributed the collection's decline. By 1962, 27 of the original 39 bonsai survived. Among those that perished was the Hinoki Cypress that had been Hirohito's gift to the Andersons.
Read more about this topic: Larz Anderson Bonsai Collection
Famous quotes containing the word decline:
“Considered physiologically, everything ugly weakens and saddens man. It reminds him of decay, danger, impotence; it actually reduces his strength. The effect of ugliness can be measured with a dynamometer. Whenever anyone feels depressed, he senses the proximity of something “ugly.” His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride—they decline with ugliness, they rise with beauty.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“But only that soul can be my friend which I encounter on the line of my own march, that soul to which I do not decline, and which does not decline me, but, native of the same celestial latitude, repeats in its own all my experience.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)