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Who really said it

The Architect Can Only Advise His Client to Plant Vines

Not Herbert Hoover — actually Frank Lloyd Wright Frank Lloyd Wright 1867–1959 · American architect, designer and writer
Disputed In copyright

Wright wrote it as point 11 of the fourteen instructions that close his lecture “To the Young Man in Architecture,” printed in Two Lectures on Architecture (The Art Institute of Chicago, 1931): “The physician can bury his mistakes,—but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines.” Herbert Hoover did write a near-identical joke, but in his version the architects are the ones getting away with something — his subject is the engineer, who cannot.

Last verified 7 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“The Architect Can Only Advise His Client to Plant Vines” Frank Lloyd Wright, "To the Young Man in Architecture," in Two Lectures on Architecture (The Art Institute of Chicago, 1931), p. 62. Not Herbert Hoover, whose similar line is about engineers, not architects. · Verbatim: “The physician can bury his mistakes,—but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines.”

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Herbert Hoover. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation (Wright’s estate)). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

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In context

Evoking the world of Frank Lloyd Wright — American architect, designer and writer. Theme: "The Architect Can Only Advise His Client to Plant Vines". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

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Provenance

Where the line actually appears

Work
Two Lectures on Architecture
Lecture
“To the Young Man in Architecture” — point 11 of fourteen
Published
1931 · The Art Institute of Chicago (printed by The Lakeside Press, R. R. Donnelley & Sons), page 62
Popular variant
Reworded by Wright in the New York Times Magazine, 4 October 1953; “doctor” replaces “physician” in print by 1954

11. Then go as far away as possible from home to build your first buildings. The physician can bury his mistakes,—but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines. Point 11 of 14

Transcribed by Quote Investigator from the 1931 volume, page 62. The lecture ends with fourteen numbered instructions to young architects; the vines gag is the tail of number eleven, whose real advice is to build your first buildings a long way from home.

HathiTrust catalog record: Two Lectures on Architecture (1931)

How the line travelled

  • 1913 — the shape of the joke already exists. A New York Evening Post gardening column by Walter B. Hayward argues that architects’ mistakes “have to be right out in plain sight, unless they can be hidden by vines and trees” — a precursor located by lexicographer Barry Popik and printed by Quote Investigator ↗.
  • 1931 — Frank Lloyd Wright closes his lecture “To the Young Man in Architecture” with fourteen numbered points, and number eleven carries the line in its original form. It is printed in Two Lectures on Architecture (The Art Institute of Chicago, 1931 ↗), page 62 according to Quote Investigator ↗.
  • 1950s — Herbert Hoover builds the same joke into his set piece on engineering, aimed the other way: the engineer “cannot, like the architects, cover his failures with trees and vines” (Hoover Presidential Foundation ↗, which dates its text to an Engineer’s Week article of 1954). Quote Investigator cites a version from Hoover’s 9 February 1950 address to the Engineering Society of the Moles.
  • 1953–54 — Wright uses the jest again in the New York Times Magazine of 4 October 1953, the version Wikiquote ↗ and the standard quotation dictionaries carry. A year later a Cleveland newspaper printed the swap that stuck — “doctor” for “physician” — crediting Reader’s Digest.
In copyright

The sentence first appeared in Two Lectures on Architecture, published in 1931 — recent enough that it is not in the public domain in the United States in 2026, and HathiTrust still restricts its scan of the book to search-only rather than full view ↗. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation states that it owns “numerous copyrighted materials” of Wright’s and reserves all rights in them ↗.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Why Hoover gets the credit

This is an unusually honest mix-up: Herbert Hoover really did write a sentence about architects hiding their failures behind greenery. It is just not this sentence, and in his version the architect is the villain of the piece rather than the speaker.

Herbert Hoover Right joke, wrong side of it

Hoover — a mining engineer long before he was a president — built a famous set piece contrasting the engineer with every other profession. The engineer, he wrote, “cannot bury his mistakes in the grave like the doctors… He cannot, like the architects, cover his failures with trees and vines” (Hoover Presidential Foundation ↗). The architects are his foil. He is not advising anyone to plant anything.

Hoover’s version, dated Later than Wright

Quote Investigator dates a Hoover version to his address of 9 February 1950 to the Engineering Society of the Moles in New York, published in Addresses Upon the American Road: 1948–1950; the Hoover Presidential Foundation dates its own text to a 1954 Engineer’s Week article; Wikiquote prints it from chapter 11 of his memoirs. All of those come after Wright’s 1931 lecture ↗.

“A doctor can bury his mistakes…” Later rewording

Wright wrote “physician,” not “doctor.” Quote Investigator finds the “doctor” substitution in print in a Cleveland newspaper in 1954, credited to Reader’s Digest — and that softened version is the one that circulates today, usually with no source attached at all ↗.

Arch Oboler Set-up man, not author

A 1941 newspaper column relaying an item from the March Ladies’ Home Journal has the radio writer Arch Oboler tell Wright that doctors can bury their mistakes but a wrong house is a living reproach; Wright answers that architects “get the client to plant vines” (Quote Investigator ↗). Oboler fed the line; he did not coin it, and Wright had already printed it a decade earlier.

The sentence is Frank Lloyd Wright’s, from a lecture printed in 1931. Herbert Hoover later used the same joke and aimed it the other way — at architects, in defence of engineers (Quote Investigator ↗).

Context

Why it stuck

The joke lands because it flatters the profession it insults. A physician’s failures are private; an architect’s stand in the street for a century, and the only remedy on offer is greenery. Wright did not deliver it as a standalone epigram — he buried it at the end of a scolding instruction to young architects to spend ten years preparing and then build their first buildings as far from home as possible, precisely because they would not be able to hide them.

Herbert Hoover liked the same joke well enough to rebuild it from the engineer’s side, where the architect becomes the lucky one who gets to plant ivy over his errors. That inversion is the likeliest reason his name migrated onto Wright’s wording: two of the most-quoted Americans of the century, one professional grudge, one shared punchline about vines.

The physician can bury his mistakes,—but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines.

The precursor almost nobody cites

Quote Investigator credits lexicographer Barry Popik with finding the joke already fully formed in 1913, in a New York Evening Post gardening column by Walter B. Hayward: architects’ mistakes, he wrote, “have to be right out in plain sight, unless they can be hidden by vines and trees.” The columns were collected the following year as The Commuter’s Garden (Quote Investigator ↗).

The older half of the gag — that doctors get to bury their errors — is older still. Quote Investigator prints an 1883 Michigan agricultural lecture using it against farmers: the farmer’s mistakes “remain above ground where they are seen and known by all men.” Wright’s contribution was the vines, and the compression.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Failure Creativity Humility

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Origin: The Architect Can Only Advise His Client to Plant Vinesquoteinvestigator.com

The definitive chronology: the 1913 Hayward precursor, Wright’s 1931 lecture, the 1941 Arch Oboler exchange, Hoover’s 1950 version, and the 1953–54 rewordings.
Frank Lloyd Wright — Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Carries the line in the sourced Quotes section, cited to the New York Times Magazine of 4 October 1953, with the “doctor” paraphrase noted.
Herbert Hoover — Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Prints Hoover’s engineering passage — including the architects-and-vines clause — under his memoirs, chapter 11, “The Profession of Engineering.”
Herbert Hoover, “Engineering as a Profession”hooverpresidentialfoundation.org

Hoover’s own text, dated by the Foundation to a 1954 Engineer’s Week article — the real source of the Hoover line people confuse with Wright’s.
Two Lectures on Architecture (1931) — catalog recordcatalog.hathitrust.org

Confirms the book that prints the lecture: published 1931, and still restricted to search-only view, which is itself a copyright signal.
The Commuter’s Garden (1914) — catalog recordcatalog.hathitrust.org

Walter B. Hayward’s collected New York Evening Post columns, the 1913–14 precursor Quote Investigator cites; public domain and in full view.

The actual author

Who wrote it

Frank Lloyd Wright

1867–1959 · American architect, designer and writer

Frank Lloyd Wright was the most famous American architect of the twentieth century — the Prairie houses, Fallingwater, the spiral of the Guggenheim — and, by the 1930s, an equally practised writer and lecturer. The vines line comes from that second career: a printed lecture aimed squarely at young architects, in which the joke is the sugar on a set of unsentimental instructions about preparation and humility. He kept using it for the rest of his life, and it reached most people through a New York Times Magazine piece published in 1953.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source

Frank Lloyd Wright, “To the Young Man in Architecture,” in Two Lectures on Architecture (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1931), 62, point 11. Chronology and citations per Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: The Architect Can Only Advise His Client to Plant Vines,” 3 May 2011.

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