Luther Burbank

American horticulturalist

• Born: March 7, 1849
• Birthplace: Lancaster, Massachusetts
• Died: April 11, 1926
• Place of death: Santa Rosa, California

The leading American plant breeder of his time, Burbank introduced more than eight hundred new plants and gave the world a lesson in the value of horticultural science by demonstrating how to make plants work for the benefit of human society.

Early Life

Luther Burbank was the thirteenth child of Samuel Walton Burbank, a farmer and brickmaker and a descendant of seventeenth century English stock. Luther’s mother, Olive Ross, a strong-featured and strong-willed woman of Scottish and French descent, was Samuel’s third wife. He was a shy youngster seldom disciplined by his parents. His siblings included a brother and sister as well as three half-brothers and two half-sisters. He received an elementary school education near his home but was never comfortable with oral recitation.

At the age of fifteen, Burbank entered Lancaster Academy, a preparatory school for Harvard and Yale, and studied the basic curriculum of Latin, Greek, French, geometry, algebra, arithmetic, philosophy, drawing, and English. Burbank was apparently a good student, ranking eighth out of the top ten students in his class in 1867. He was an avid reader, as is evidenced by his early familiarity with the works of Charles Darwin, Alexander von Humboldt, and Henry David Thoreau. The writings of these naturalists were to have a lasting impact on young Burbank, but the most important influence in developing his scientific curiosity was his cousin Levi Sumner Burbank, the curator of geology at the Boston Society of Natural History.

As a young man, Burbank was five feet, eight inches tall, about 125 pounds, with sparkling blue eyes. After his school experience, he attempted two nonacademic careers. The first was a job in the Worcester branch factory of the Ames Plow Works. Burbank had gone to the factory for three or four summers to learn the trade of a mechanic. After high school, he worked at the Ames Plow Works turning plow rounds on a lathe at a wage of three dollars a week. He soon designed an improvement in his machine that increased productivity, and his piecework wages rose significantly. He was not able to keep this job very long, however, because his health suffered because of the sawdust in the air.

Burbank next studied medicine under a local doctor for several months. He gave this up when his father died, in 1868. Burbank was not interested in farming at this time, although as a young boy he had shown some interest in gardening. (To the dismay of his father, Burbank transplanted weeds into the family garden plot to see if they would grow.)

In 1870, the young Burbank, always afflicted with a frail constitution, decided to take a sea voyage to improve his health. The schooner was wrecked, and he almost lost his life.

Life’s Work

In 1871, Burbank made a decision that would change his life dramatically: He resolved to try his hand at truck-gardening. At the age of twenty-one, he bought seventeen acres of land adjoining his mother’s home in Lunenburg, Massachusetts. He pursued this profession for about five years, but he was more interested in experimenting with plants than in growing them for market. In 1872, Luther found a seed ball on the plant of a potato containing twenty-three seeds, a rare occurrence. He planted the seeds and discovered one good potato (later named the “Burbank”) of attractive shape with a white skin. The tuber was destined later to become a huge commercial success. Burbank sold sixty bushels of the potatoes to James J. H. Gregory, a seedsman of Marblehead, Massachusetts, for $150.

With the money he made from the potatoes, Burbank left for California in October, 1875, as the climate there was better suited for the horticultural work that he had decided to pursue. (His mother packed him a nine-day box lunch for the long train trip.) He arrived in San Francisco on October 29, 1875. Burbank was shocked at the amount of liquor consumed in the city and he vowed never to drink liquor himself. On October 31, 1875, he reached Santa Rosa, a frontier town, north of San Francisco, that was blessed with a temperate climate. The plants he saw there grew larger than any he had ever seen, because the area had no frost.

Burbank lived for a short time with his brother Alfred and another bachelor in an eight-by-ten-foot cabin. To earn money, Burbank did carpentry work and odd jobs in the area. In the winter of 1876, Burbank went to work in Petaluma, California, at the large nursery of W. H. Pepper. He saved his money and soon returned to Santa Rosa.

In the summer of 1877, Burbank’s mother and sister Emma came to Santa Rosa and bought a house with four acres of adjacent land. Burbank rented the land and started his own nursery. Within ten years, the quality of his fruit and shade trees was famous, and he was making sixteen thousand dollars annually with his plants. His skill in plant-breeding was to assure his commercial success. In the spring of 1881, he received an order for twenty thousand prune trees for delivery in the fall. According to other nurserymen, it would take eighteen months to fill such a large order, but Burbank used the technique of “force budding” to deliver the trees on schedule.

Burbank was interested in cross-breeding domestic plant stock with foreign material, so in 1885, he imported plum seedlings from Yokohama, Japan. One of these seedlings became the famous “Burbank plum” that is still popular today. That same year, Luther bought eighteen acres at Sebastopol near Santa Rosa to use for experimental growing. By 1888, he was committed to the development of new varieties of plants, so he sold part of his retail nursery business (the fruit and shade tree segment) to his partner, R. W. Bell. Burbank could now concentrate on the creation of new or unusual plant materials to sell at wholesale to other nurserymen.

On September 23, 1890, the forty-one-year-old horticulturist married a domineering young widow, Helen A. Coleman, from Denver, Colorado. Almost immediately, conflicts developed between Helen and Burbank’s mother and sister. The marriage, which lasted six years, caused Burbank much mental and physical aggravation, partly because of Helen’s violent temper.

By 1893, Burbank had developed enough different varieties of walnuts, berries, plums, prunes, roses, lilies, potatoes, and quinces to list them in his nursery catalog, New Creations in Fruits and Flowers (1893). Stark Brothers’ Nurseries of Missouri and several large eastern retail nurseries made significant purchases from this catalog, thereby assuring Burbank’s future financial success. As the years passed, Burbank attracted a large clientele of professional nurserymen both in the United States and abroad.

On the threshold of the twentieth century, Burbank’s products were being grown throughout the world, and his reputation as the “wizard of horticulture” was well established. There was no magical formula, however, to the Burbank success story, only hard work, perseverance, and a keen intuition as to what plants would prove a commercial success. At this time, Burbank developed the Shasta daisy, a perennial favorite of home gardeners. His breeding method consisted of choosing American wild daisies as breeding stock, introducing pollen from European daisies, and crossing the resultant hybrids with a Japanese species. Any plant in any part of the world was fair game in Burbank’s search for marketable products.

Burbank was to come increasingly under the criticism of other horticulturists, particularly those attached to university experiment stations. (Burbank did not have the formal college education in the plant sciences that some university-trained experts thought necessary, although he did receive an honorary doctor of science degree from Tufts College in 1905.) It was true that he did not keep proper records of his experimental crossings or always guard against self-pollination in his work, but he was more interested in the results of experimentation, not the theory. He gave the impression at times of being a consummate egotist; he was the most famous plant breeder in America, and none too modest about this reputation. He allowed others to exaggerate the merits of his products, and because of the sheer volume of the materials he was turning out, he did not take as much time to prove the reliability of those creations as he had been able to earlier in his career.

The Carnegie Institute became interested in Burbank’s techniques and plants and, between 1905 and 1909, awarded him a grant of ten thousand dollars annually with the stipulation that a representative from the institute would observe Burbank’s methods and write a report on them. (The report on the observations was never compiled by the Institute, in part because of the difficulty of interpreting Burbank’s experimental notes.)

Burbank had been working on the development of a spineless cactus for use as cattle food, and in 1906, he introduced this cactus to the nursery trade. It proved to be a disappointment because it was not completely spineless, and the resultant unfavorable publicity damaged Burbank’s reputation. Other products that did not live up to the claims of his catalog included the “Winter rhubarb” and a hybrid berry that Burbank called the “Sunberry.” These failures called into question his credibility, particularly among those horticulturists and breeders who may have felt resentful of his fame.

In 1912, the Luther Burbank Society and the Luther Burbank Press were formed for the purpose of promoting and selling a multivolume work on the man and his accomplishments, Luther Burbank: His Methods and Discoveries and Their Practical Applications (1915). Unfortunately, the promotional tactics and “hype” associated with marketing the twelve-volume set cast a further shadow upon his reputation, although the color photographs and illustrations in them were quite unusual for that time.

That same year, 1912, saw the organization of the Luther Burbank Company, another vehicle used by exploiters, with Burbank’s unwitting consent, to promote his name in association with the marketing of his horticultural creations. Rollo J. Hough and W. Garner Smith received the exclusive rights to sell Burbank’s products. These financiers, however, knew very little about the nursery business. Soon quality control grew lax, and Burbank’s reputation suffered accordingly. By 1916, the Luther Burbank Press went out of business, and many investors lost their money in the enterprise. That same year the Luther Burbank Company declared bankruptcy and Burbank resumed control of his nursery and seed business. These failures suggest that Burbank was not a very good businessperson in his later years, but in spite of these failures, he still prospered financially.

In 1916, at the age of sixty-seven, Burbank married his young secretary, Elizabeth Jane Waters. International affairs were to involve the United States in World War I by the next year, and although Burbank was a pacifist, he was to support the American war effort. During the war he introduced a wheat, “Quality,” which turned out to be a previously bred Australian variety. His credibility as a cereal breeder was called into question, although he initially believed that he had developed a new hybrid.

For all the criticisms arising from the professional horticultural ranks, Burbank’s popular image remained intact. His health, however, never robust, grew worse. During the first few years of the 1920’s, a series of illnesses beset him that were to undermine further his already failing constitution. On March 24, 1926, Burbank suffered a heart attack; on April 11, he died. He was buried in the yard of his old home in Santa Rosa, under a cedar of Lebanon that he had grown from a seed years before.

Significance

In order to evaluate the work of Luther Burbank it is necessary to evaluate the man. Born into a strict New England Puritanical background, he changed his religion to that of the Baptist faith, then to Unitarianism. He believed that he had psychic powers, a conviction that may have contributed to his high-strung, nervous personality. Something of a hypochondriac and diet faddist, he ascribed in his latter years to the practice of yoga.

Burbank the man was always different from those around him, as is so often the case with those who might be labeled “creative.” He saw things differently from the way most of his peers did, and because of his outspoken opinions, he often became the center of controversy, both in his professional and personal life. The maverick in Burbank dictated his unique approaches to horticulture. He dared to experiment, to attempt the new and untried, and sometimes to fail. These failures were difficult for a man who needed the approval and praise of his colleagues and adoring supporters.

It was among the general gardening public that Burbank was to have the greatest appeal. He popularized horticulture as a science among those amateur gardeners who wanted something new, something different, something unique. It is for this spirit of seeking the unknown that Burbank should best be remembered: He was a pioneer unafraid to reach for the unreachable. Burbank epitomized that spirit of discovery coupled with the hope of success that so characterized early twentieth century America.

Bibliography

Burbank, Luther, with Wilbur Hall. The Harvest of the Years. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927. This alleged autobiography was ghostwritten by Wilbur Hall and published the year after Burbank’s death. An introductory biography gives no real background to his life. The volume in general is a laudatory account of Burbank’s work. Not documented, but Burbank does attempt to dispel the aura of mystery surrounding his plant developments.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Partner of Nature. Edited by Wilbur Hall. New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1939. This book, ghostwritten and published after Burbank’s death, is a single-volume condensation of the twelve-volume work by Burbank, Luther Burbank: His Methods and Discoveries and Their Practical Application, which was edited by John Whitson, Robert John, and Henry Smith Williams and published in New York by the Luther Burbank Press between 1914 and 1915. The condensed volume is aimed at a general audience interested in gardening rather than in the technical aspects of plant breeding.

“Crazy for Shasta Daisies.” Martha Stewart Living 124 (March, 2004): 62. Recounts Burbank’s efforts to breed the ideal daisy, despite skepticism from some botanists.

Dreyer, Peter. A Gardener Touched with Genius: The Life of Luther Burbank. New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1975. Rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. This revised edition of the original 1975 work is still the definitive biography of Luther Burbank. Incorporating the correspondence of his friend Edward J. Wickson and the papers of the plant scientist George H. Shull, this book expands and refines the previous 1945 biography of Burbank by Walter L. Howard and the unpublished critical work of the plant geneticist Donald Jones. Well documented, but no separate bibliography is included.

Felciano, Renée, and Jean C. Fisher. Gold Ridge Experiment Farm, Sebastopol, California: A History of the Property, 1884-1986. Sebastopol, Calif.: Sonoma County Landmarks Commission, Sebastopol Area Housing Corporation, 2004. A history of Burbank’s experimental farm, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The book is available from the Western Sonoma County Historical Society, a Sebastopol-based organization that is restoring the farm’s cottage.

Gould, Stephen Jay. “Does the Stoneless Plum Instruct the Thinking Reed?” Natural History 101, no. 4 (April, 1992): 16. Examines Burbank’s vision of a genetically superior genetic race, a concept that was part of a wider eugenics movement.

Harwood, W. S. New Creations in Plant Life: An Authoritative Account of the Life and Work of Luther Burbank. New York: Macmillan, 1905. An exaggerated account of Burbank’s achievements. Misleading statements abound in this work, giving Burbank the status of a miracle worker with almost supernatural powers. This was, however, the first complete account of Burbank’s plant breeding techniques.

Howard, Walter L. “Luther Burbank: A Victim of Hero Worship.” Chronica Botanica 9 (Winter, 1945): 299-506. Written by an emeritus professor of pomology at the University of California, this book-length article is a successful effort at portraying the real Burbank beneath the exaggerated facade that the general public knew. Points out the controversial episodes in Burbank’s life and brings him “down to earth.” Supplies the honest facts about Burbank’s work without prejudice or judgmental rhetoric.

Kraft, Ken, and Pat Kraft. Luther Burbank: The Wizard and the Man. New York: Meredith Press, 1967. The first of the modern biographies of Burbank that dared to point out some of his faults and omissions. This well-written, readable work contains one particularly interesting chapter on Burbank’s attitudes on diet and health. Generally informative, balanced account of the “plant wizard.”