“And he gave it for his opinion, that whosoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.” So suggested Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels (1726). If Swift was right, and there is little doubt indeed that is so, then Luther Burbank’s name should better recognized than Obama, Putin, or Harper along with many others.
The son of a farmer, Luther Burbank was born on 7 March 1849 in Lancaster, Massachusetts. He had little formal education, attending Lancaster County Academy high school only in winter and working on his father’s farm the rest of the year. Despite this he became an acknowledged horticulturist, botanist and pioneer in agricultural science.
His Burbank potato earned him fame and fortune when he was just twenty-three-years-old. A chance discovery of a potato seedball in his mother’s Lunenburg, Massachusetts, vegetable garden developed into the famed potato. He sold it in 1873 to nurseryman J. J. H. Gregory for $150. This was enough to pay his way to Santa Rosa, California, two years later. There he purchased four acres, establishing his home, seed vault, greenhouse, nursery, and experimental plots. It continues to be maintained as the Luther Burbank Experimental Gardens that last year were recommended by Popular Science magazine as one of the scientific sites in the U.S. to be visited.
His transplanted hometown is commemorated in the Santa Rosa plum, one of seventy-eight new fruits Burbank developed there over the next half-century, including a stoneless cherry and a white blackberry. Also emerging from his test acres nine new vegetables and ten new nuts. An unusual addition was a spineless Opuntia prickly pear cactus, ideal for feeding safely to livestock. “The secret of improved plant breeding, apart from scientific knowledge, is love,” he suggested of his success. However, he warned on another occasion that, “If you violate Nature’s laws you are your own prosecuting attorney, judge, jury and hangman.”
It was not only food crops that interested Burbank. “Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful; they are sunshine, food and medicine for the soul,” he observed. Proving it he created, among several hundred other ornamental additions to gardens everywhere, was the Shasta daisy.
A frequently inquiry involved the city of Burbank, Los Angeles County, famous – or infamous – for Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In: “coming to you from high atop the carwash in beautiful downtown Burbank.” In fact it was named after New Hampshire-born dentist and entrepreneur David Burbank, 1821-95, who moved to California in the 1850s. In 1867 he purchased two ranchos totaling 8,500 acres to form an extremely successful sheep ranch. He sold this in 1886 for about $240,000 to a development company, which named it in his honour.
Towards the end of a long life – he died on 11 April 1926 in Santa Rosa, Burbank was able to observe: “In the span of my own lifetime I observed such wonderous progress in plant evolution that I look forward optimistically to a health, happy world as soon as its children are taught the principles of simple and rational living.”
The potato he developed from the chance find in his mother’s garden is the ancestor of the Russell Burbank, the spud put Idaho on the map and the kind the kind that McCain’s and McDonald’s make into their famous fries.
Luther Burbank certainly performed an essential service for his country and many others, but he was hard put to profit from his introductions. Plant breeders in his day had no protection. Four years after he died this was corrected when the U.S. passed the Plant Patent Act of 1930. “It is well for people who think to change their minds occasionally in order to keep them clean. For those who do not think, it is best to at least rearrange their prejudices once in a while,” as he once said.
Wes Porter is a horticultural consultant and writer based in Toronto. Wes has over 40 years of experience in both temperate and tropical horticulture from three continents.
