New creations in plant life; an authoritative account of the life and work of Luther Burbank

Front matter

'oo

A

■•is

Preface

Pin HE preparation of this volume has been a work of particular pleasure: First, because of the unusual interest which has centered in the development of the material, material which takes its rise in primal places and flows in a broad stream outward; and, second, and paramount, it has been a pleasure because of the contact it has brought with the man whose life and achievements it can but inadequately portray.

When the demands of his great work have been most exacting, he has never shrunk from giving still more of his strength to the illumination of obscure points ; when the work has worn upon him so that it has taxed his energies to the utmost, while care sought out the strings of his nerves to play sharp discords upon them, he has never failed in patience or

• * Vll

PREFACE

yielded to the irritation that must have swept a lesser man off his feet.

For the unfailing courtesy, for the superb thoughtfulness, for the rare gift of clarity of speech, — for all these, and far more, I am under obligation to the man about whom this book is written. If it shall be an exposition of his great work which shall bring pleasure and possibly some measure of profit to those who read, and, beyond, if it shall point the way to a still wider extension of the work of which Luther Burbank is so conspicuous a pioneer and leader, I shall indeed be glad.

W. S. H.

vm

Table Of Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Luther Burbank, the Man . . .1

II. General Methods of Work ... 24

Chapter I

UTHER BURBANK, of whose life, ^ achievements and methods this book is to treat, is the foremost plant-breeder in the world. Over two thousand five hundred distinct species are in the list of the plants upon which he has worked, embracing a large and comprehensive field of operations. He has also produced more new forms of plant life than any other man, and has exerted a unique and powerful influence.

These new forms of plant life may be brought into two classes, — those which have added to the wealth of nations and enriched the dietary of the race, — as new and improved nuts, fruits and vegetables; and those which have made the world more beautiful, — the new and improved forms of flowers.

Without a university training and with only a fundamental education upon which he has builded by wide reading, he yet leads the scientific world in the department to which he has given his life. He has suffered as few men suffer, not only from actual physical want and privation but from the unjust criticism of those who did not comprehend; but he has preserved through it all an unshaken confidence in the ultimate triumph of all good forces in human life. He has been engaged in a line of work so novel and so profitable he could easily have built up a fortune, yet he has subjected himself all his life to the most rigid self-denial and sacrifice in order that every energy and every resource might be devoted to the betterment of the world.

Luther Burbank was born in the town of Lancaster, Massachusetts, not far from the city of Boston, on the 7th of March, 1849. Two controlling streams met in the forming of the main current of his life. From his father, a cultivated man of English extraction, came an intense love for books; from his mother, whose ancestry was Scotch, an ardent love for all beautiful forms of life. These two hereditary influences have been at work all through his life,— the one broadening, the other deepening his nature.

From the earliest childhood he was passionately devoted to flowers and to all forms of plant life. Very many incidents are related illustrative of this. His mother and sisters had noticed that whenever he was given a flower, while lying in his cradle, he always held it with a certain childish tenderness, never crushing nor dropping it but keeping it, if allowed, until its bloom was faded or its fragrance gone. One day when his sister had given him a flower he held it in his tiny fingers with his usual earnestness until a petal fell off. Then, with infinite childish patience, he strove to put the petal back in place and thus restore the flower. When a little older and able to toddle about, he chose plants for pets instead of animals. He was given a plant in a pot, a so-called lobster cactus as the variety of cactus was locally known, and for hours at a time he trudged about house and yard carrying the cactus plant in his little arms. One day he stumbled and fell, broke the plant from its stem and destroyed the pot. It was a day of great sadness, for he

S was as inconsolable in his grief over the loss of the pet plant as another child would have been over the death of a bird or a faithful dog.

Strangely enough, a half century later, in the prime of his manhood, he has given years of his life to the study of other forms of this pet of his childhood days, creating a series of thornless, edible cacti, not only providing a vast reservoir of food for man and for uncounted millions of the beasts of the field, but paving the way for the reclamation of the desert places of the earth. That which was once a dangerous foe of man and beast becomes, through him, a stanch friend; — it is a noble boon to the race.

Year by year, as he grew into boyhood, his love for all the beautiful things in the world around him steadily deepened. As soon as he was old enough to be placed in school, he at once attracted the attention of his teachers by his love for study. The love for his school and the love for the flowers and the trees and the birds were always manifest. And in the ripe days of his prime one may see him turn with boyish eagerness from the discussion of some deep problem of human life to listen to the note of a lark in the sky.

By the time he had reached the age of twelve he had come to a knowledge of the outward forms of nature such as few lads ever attain at such an age. All the books he could command bearing upon any phase of science or nature he read and reread. The habit thus acquired has lasted. He may not be able to tell you the plot of the latest novel, but be sure he will be able to talk with you about the latest discovery of the scientists and to dissect their conclusions with consummate art. I can in no way better illustrate the trend of the lad's mind at that time than to say that in his maturer years the author which he has read most and which he quotes more often than any other is Ralph Waldo Emerson.

As a lad, he was not indifferent to the sports of other children, and entered heartily into many of them, though there was ever a greater fascination for him in the open page of a book than in rod or gun or ball. And greatest of all was the fascination of the natural world opening to him as it opens to the heart of a poet.

In the town of Lancaster there was a wellequipped academy to which he was drawn as soon as he had finished the common school. This he attended during the winter for several seasons, spending the rest of the year in work. The town had a large and well-stocked library, and into this, and into his father's few but carefully chosen books, he delved whenever there was opportunity. His father and his father's brother, a minister, were personal friends of Emerson. The uncle's son, the boy's cousin, considerably older, was greatly interested in science and was also a personal friend of Agassiz, afterward becoming a successful educator and a writer of more than local note on scientific topics, particularly geology. Between the two there was a strong bond of friendship. The influence of such surroundings had much to do in shaping the lad's nature. Year by year environment forces were at work, and in them may be seen the prophecy of the development of this wonderful life.

During several summers the boy worked in the city of Worcester, Massachusetts, in a factory. His wage was small and the work was hard and irksome, but he even then had his ideals toward which he was working, and he kept on and up amidst many discouragements. He learned soon, however, that, as there were seven days in the week and as it cost him at least fifty cents a day to live, he could not get along very satisfactorily on a six- day wage of fifty cents. The bent of the boy's mind now seemed to be toward what his relatives and friends thought was invention, but which, though it included invention in the ordinary meaning of the word, was far beyond this in scope. When still younger, he was standing one day by the side of a number of his elders who were vainly trying to put together a mower. One piece of the machinery would not fit, and, after much trying, they were giving up, when the boy, rarely venturing a word of advice to an elder, stepped forward and suggested how the piece should go. It was put in place and the machine moved off.

When asked how he knew the piece of iron belonged in that particular place, he replied laconically :

"Because you couldn't put it anywhere else!"

Studying how he might make both ends meet in the factory on his scant pay, he discovered a way to construct a machine which would do away with the work of at least half a dozen men. He made the invention, and his delighted employers followed with a substantial increase in his pay. They predicted for him, as did his friends, a brilliant future as an inventor, and all urged him to set about such a life. He has disregarded the advice of his friends in later years, as he did then; and he has never found reason for regret, even though the way he has traveled has led through pain and sacrifice.

Day by day in the midst of the toil of the factory, unswerved from his ideals by the promise of greater pecuniary reward, the dominant chord in his life was always sounding, struck as it was by the supreme purpose of his soul — to make new things better than the old, to make the old ones better than they were. All through a life no less scarred with sacrifice than adorned with triumph this same chord has sounded, deeper and broader in its harmony as the years have come, but not more true in the creation of marvelous forms of plant life than in the making of a machine to quicken and cheapen the process of manufacturing a plow.

But there came a day he never forgot, a red-letter day in his calendar. He had left the factory and had begun market -gardening and seed-raising in a small way. It was far more to his taste and in direct line with the future. He had noticed that there were a good many variations in the green tops of some potatoes he was raising, and that in this particular lot there was but one which bore a seed -ball. He had already begun a close study of the characteristics of plants, and he at once reasoned that if this seed -ball came upon but one of all the varying plants, its product, if it should be planted, should show still greater variation. So he watched this seed -ball with unusual care. One day, to his despair, he found that the seed-ball was missing. He was about to give up the whole matter when it occurred to him he would make a search upon the ground. He found the seed -ball at last, where it had been knocked off probably by some wandering dog rushing through the garden.

From it came the Burbank potato, which comparatively few people associate with Luther

Burbank, the great plant -breeder. The potato which he developed from this seed -ball has not only disproved the dictum of those who said a potato famine was at hand because of the steady deterioration of the world's stock, but it has added to the wealth of this nation alone upwards of twenty millions of dollars. The creator of the new potato sold it to a local seedsman for $150.

It was not long after this that he suffered a partial sunstroke in the broiling heat of a July day and, seeking a climate where he might be able to live an outdoor life without fear of a return attack, and where he might hope some day to put in effect some of the theories of the development of plant life already stirring in his brain, he started for California, with a slender purse and ten of his new potatoes. He reached California in 1875, and went north from San Francisco some fifty miles to an unimproved valley lying between two spurs of the Coast Range Mountains, today a rich fruit and farming country.

He was then a little past twenty-one, slender, not over-strong, and yet possessed of much vitality and endurance. These latter he was soon called upon to put to test. The country was new, and the few ranchers and farmers had not yet begun to realize the possibilities of their region in the way of fruit culture. He sought for work, that he might get ahead enough to make a start as a nurseryman. He saw the possibilities of the country in this line and the promise of a good living, and perhaps a competence if he could only get established. But work was not easy to get. Day after day he sought it and failed, and day by day his slender store of money ran down. He did all sorts of odd jobs, many of them far beyond his strength. He heard of a new building to be put up in the frontier town. He applied for work. He had no tools, but, being promised a job if he had a shingling hatchet, he invested nearly all of his remaining funds in one, only to find, the next morning, that the job had gone to some one else.

He found more steady work at last at a mere pittance, cleaning out chicken-coops on a chicken-ranch. The work was disagreeable in the extreme, but he was willing to do anything that was honorable. At this time he had no place to sleep nights, and for months made his bed in a chicken-coop, unable to get enough money ahead to pay for regular lodgings. Occasionally, when work altogether failed, he was reduced to absolute want. It was his habit at such times to go to the village meat market, secure the refuse bones saved for dogs, and get from them what meat he could.

He found steady employment at last in a small nursery at a beggarly wage. Not being able to hire lodgings, he slept in a bare, damp, unwholesome room above the steaming hothouse, where for days and nights at a time his clothing was never dry. He was passing through such privations as those through which, in the strange allotments of fortune, many another great man has passed.

The constant exposure and lack of nourishing food made rapid inroads upon a not too strong constitution, and this, with overwork, brought on an attack of fever. A woman in the neighborhood, herself in straitened circumstances, found him one day in such a critical condition that she insisted on sharing with him the small portion of milk which she could afford to spare from the one cow that supplied her family. He protested against taking it because he might never be able to repay her, and, indeed, there was scant hope in his condition that he would live to do it. The woman insisted, and the pint of milk a day which she brought to him saved his life.

The man who was to become the foremost figure in the world in his line of life, and who was to pave the way by his own discoveries and creations for others of all lands to follow in his footsteps, was a stranger in a strange land, close to starvation, penniless, beset by disease, hard by the gates of death. And yet never for an instant did this heroic figure lose hope, never did he abandon confidence in himself, not once did he swerve from the path he had marked out. In the midst of all he kept an unshaken faith. He accepted the trials that came, not as a matter of course, not tamely, nor with any mock heroics, but as a passing necessity. His resolution was of iron, his will of steel, his heart of gold ; he was fighting in the splendid armor of a clean life.

It was a wan and haggard figure that rose at last from his sick bed and wandered from place to place in search of work. Matters shaped themselves gradually, more and more in his favor and he went from one odd job to another, slowly saving a little money and regaining his health. The day came at last when he had a bit of a balance in the bank and soon after he was able in a small way to set up in business for himself.

He secured a small plot of ground and established the nursery which was to become famous throughout not only his own state but the country at large. His heart was in his work now, but there was something else. All through these years of early manhood, in the midst of discouragement and privation, he never let go of the plan of his life — to become not merely a raiser of plants but an improver and a creator. Even in those first days, as chance offered, he began that wonderful series of experiments which has astonished the scientific men of two hemispheres and established an epoch in the life of the vegetable kingdom from which the future will reckon.

One day there came to the young nurseryman an order in the filling of which he displayed that boldness of plan and audacity of execution which have many a time marked his progress. The order was from a man who was going to start a large prune ranch. He wanted twenty thousand young prune trees to set out. It would take in the ordinary course of events from two and a half to three years for a nurseryman to raise the trees, but this was a hurry-up order; if it was to be filled, it must be filled in nine months.

He took the order. With all haste he scoured the country for men and boys to plant almonds. It was late in the season and the almond seed was the only one which would sprout at that time among all the trees that were suitable for his plans. It grows very rapidly, too, and this was taken into account. In a comparatively short time the young shoots were big enough for budding. Twenty thousand prune buds were in readiness, were budded into the growing almonds, and the young trees started forward in their race for the prize. When the nine months were up the twenty thousand prune trees were ready. Nature had been outwitted, or, better put, had been led to outdo herself; the fruit-grower was delighted ; the young nurseryman was a good many dollars in pocket. Today, twenty years afterward, one of the finest prune orchards in California or the world is growing from these trees.

It was a concrete illustration of the resourcefulness of the man and of that which has again and again been shown in his later life, his supreme indifference to precedent.

He early established an unvarying rule, never to send out anything which was not, so far as lay in his power, precisely what it was represented to be. So his name became a synonym for exact honesty, — if it came from Burbank, it was to be depended upon.

An incident well illustrates the confidence men had in him when once they came to know him. He was in need of some extra money to use in carrying forward a branch of his work. He had applied for a loan unsuccessfully at quite a number of places. His very modesty and shrinkingness, in the eyes of a business man, stood against him. One day, when he had given up hope of the loan, he saw a team of horses in the distance coming down the dusty road. As the team drew near he recognized a man who lived in the region, by common reputation a miserable old skinflint. Hailing from the road as he drove up, he called out:

O

w O c si X!

SO pq

"Say, young feller, I've been watchin' you a long 1 time. You're alius attendin' to bizness. But a man that kin do what you kin do oughter have an easier time than you're havin'. Don't you need a little extry cash once in a while?"

Greatly interested in such a query from such a man, he answered that he could use a little additional money now and then, — in fact, he knew where he could put a hundred dollars that very day, in a place where it would bring in a handsome return.

Pulling out an old wallet, the so-called skinflint counted out two hundred dollars and handed them to the astonished nurseryman.

"No," as he drove off, "I don't want no note, nor no intrust nuther: when you git ready to pay it, all right. G'long, there!"

The years now rapidly passed. The business began to yield more handsomely, and yet he was less and less satisfied with the outlook. In the midst of the exacting demands of his work, he yet found time to devote to experimentation with new forms of plant life, — always before him the supreme purpose of his life. Reticent by nature, though never secretive, he did not talk over his new ideas with any one. No one was to know what he was engaged in until such time as he had something to show for it.

As he had opportunity, he read such few practical books on botany and the breeding of plants as he could find, but these, save in some matters of nomenclature and detail, were of little aid to him. He soon found out that he stood face to face with Nature, and only from her lips could he learn her secrets.

He read Darwin among other scientists, and was greatly interested in the Origin of Species. In his own mind were developing, at the same time, important theories, which must be noted in a later chapter. Even as he worked the hardest, and all unknown to himself in large measure, his own mind was being broadened and deepened. He saw before him now something of the possibilities of plant creation — his vision was strong and true, his perspective never distorted.

There came another red-letter day in his calendar. It was the day when he came to the formal decision that he would give up his nursery business and devote his entire time and energies to plant -breeding. As soon as his relatives and friends heard of his decision, they entered vehement protest. What greater folly could a man commit than to abandon a business now netting him nearly ten thousand dollars a year to embark upon a project at the best Quixotic and sure to end in financial ruin? It was the same sort of reasoning he had listened to when a boy, when his friends and relatives pictured a great career as an inventor.

Ridicule, pity, scorn, harsh criticism, all were alike unavailing. He listened with patience, but went forward in the fine he had marked out. So one day in the year 1893 he found himself free from the exacting demands of his business life, his extensive nursery closed out. He had entered upon a career which was to be even more exacting than this business life, but he entered upon it high in hope and rich in resolution.

Slowly he put into effect his plans. Having tested a new fruit or flower or an improved old one, he kept it back, following in his old lines as a nurseryman, until he was absolutely sure it was going to do precisely what he said it would do. Not until then was he ready to put a new creation before the world. The new and improved varieties were sold to bring him revenue for the further prosecution of his work, The sums for which they sold were ridiculously small, considering the time consumed in their production, often years of the most patient study and experimentation, and the large revenues that were derived from the new creations by the dealers purchasing them. Perhaps from one hundred dollars, at the start, up to five hundred would be an average. Orders soon began coming from Europe, where he gradually became better known, where, indeed, he was appreciated as he had never been in his own country.

His income rose steadily, but it did not match his outlay. There were laborers' wages to pay, supplies to be bought, funds provided for paying for the services of collectors in foreign lands, on the lookout for new kinds of plants. His reputation was advancing, but year by year he was falling behind and encroaching more and more upon the store set by for the rainy day.

Opposition now came from many quarters. Not only did his friends see the fulfilment of their predictions,— some of them very kindly telling him so, — but people who had heard of some of the strange things he had done, and who had not the breadth of vision to see what manner of man this was, pronounced him a charlatan, — a man who was creating all manner of unnatural forms of life, monstrosities, indeed a distinct foe to the race. A minister invited Mr. Burbank to listen to a sermon on his work, and when the guest was in the pew denounced him in bitter fashion as a man who was working in direct opposition to the will of God, in thus creating new forms of life which never should have been created, or if created, only by God himself.

Now and again arose some pseudo- scientific man who, professing unlimited friendship, sought for means to filch the rapidly increasing reputation. Others visited him with the covert purpose of exposing him as a charlatan after inspecting his methods, but, confounded by what they saw, went down the little hedgebordered walk that leads to his quiet home shamed into silence. From various sources came offers of aid; but the keen vision of the man read every proposition in its spirit as well as its letter and detected unerringly the efforts which, while apparently in his behalf, were in reality essentially selfish, planned so that others might profit by his experiences. There were strings to them; he would have none of them. He could divide responsibility, and apportion duty, but he could not yield authority. It would be fatal to have any other will than his own in command.

But he was learning now that, to accomplish the work he had mapped out, and so to leave it that others could take it up where he left it and carry it forward, it was imperative that he have assistance. Already many millions of dollars had been added to the national wealth because of his improved fruits. Already the whole world was being brightened by his flowers. And yet, if he should be able to work without handicap, the future promised far greater results than the past. Now and again, too, he was bitterly admonished that he could not work eighteen hours out of the twentyfour. Occasional illnesses came. He found that the nature he loved so well could chide as well as cheer. Several times he was laid by with dangerous nervous breakdowns.

At this point a plan was unfolded to him, considered somewhat at length in a later chapter, for substantial assistance from the Carnegie Institution in a manner which would leave him absolutely his own master and would enable that organization to become a silent partner in the furtherance of his plans.

Thus the way opened to a maximum of effort at a minimum of waste.

Chapter II

"OEFORE passing to the individual crea- -*-* tions of Mr. Burbank, it will be of interest to consider the general plan of his lifework, reserving for later chapters the minutiae of the methods, so presented and so fortified by advice from Mr. Burbank that the amateur, no less than the professional, may receive suggestions for the prosecution of plant-breeding, one of the most fascinating occupations in the world, and one full of great practical possibilities. Indeed, as Mr. Burbank puts it, results of enormous value to the race may at any time come from the work of any man who takes up plant -breeding with patience and intelligent interest.

The aim of Mr. Burbank, aside from that paramount object always overshadowing all else, to give aid to the race, is threefold :

1. The improvement of old varieties of fruits, flowers, grasses, trees and vegetables.