Claim: Horticultural societies typically engage in small-scale gardening with simple tools, these methods allow for higher population densities and the common type of horticulture is slash-and-burn cultivation.
Evidence: The origins of horticulture lie in the transition of human communities from nomadic hunter-gatherers to sedentary or semi-sedentary horticultural communities, cultivating a variety of crops on a small scale around their dwellings or in specialized plots visited occasionally during migrations from one area to the next (such as the "milpa" or maize field of Mesoamerican cultures). First, it generally encompasses a smaller scale of cultivation, using small plots of mixed crops rather than large fields of single crops. In forest areas such horticulture is often carried out in swiddens ("slash and burn" areas). Secondly, horticultural cultivations generally include a wide variety of crops, even including fruit trees with ground crops. The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), founded in 1804 as the Horticultural Society of London, is the UK's leading gardening charity. They work as gardeners, growers, therapists, designers, and technical advisors in the food and non-food sectors of horticulture. It also includes plant conservation, landscape restoration, soil management, landscape and garden design, construction and maintenance, and arboriculture. The practice of horticulture can be retraced for many thousands of years.