Burbank, Luther 1849-1926

BURBANK, LUTHER 1849-1926

Horticulturist

Background

Luther Burbank was an American original: largelyself-taught, he was an inventor and tinkerer by temperament but worked in the organic, rather than the mechanical, world and had an immense influence on academic botany and genetics. Born in Lancaster, Massachusetts, Burbank's first job was with the Ames Plow Company in Worcester (1864-1867). Then he attended the Lancaster Academy for a year, during which he first read Charles Darwin's On The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (1868), a book that exercised a profound influence on his career. Burbank learned from Darwin the methods of artificial selection that breeders use to develop desirable characteristics in domestic plants and animals. On his family's farm in Lunenburg, Massachusetts, he developed the Burbank potato, an immensely popular and economically important variety, the antecedent of the Idaho potato. In 1875 he moved to California where he established a fruit and vegetable farm in Santa Rosa in 1876. There he began experimenting with a variety of techniques such as grafting, hybridization, and cross-breeding in order to create new varieties of fruits and ornamental flowers. For the next twenty-five years he devoted himself mainly to experimentation with plant varieties, developing improved stocks of peach, pear, prune, blackberry, plum, tomato, and other plants, which he sold to commercial growers.

Burbank's Method

Burbank worked by trial and error. He would cross-pollinate the flowers of two trees by hand and plant all the resulting seeds. He would then select the dozen or so most promising seedlings to cross with other plants. With fruit trees he would graft cuttings from his seedlings to mature trees in order to obtain fruit sooner. He kept records that were haphazard and unsystematic (in those cases when he kept any records at all) and claimed to work by instinct alone according to principles he learned from Darwin's books. With berries he practiced selection on a massive scale, sometimes growing thousands of bushes and discarding all but a few from his breeding pool. Burbank had no use either for Mendelian genetics or for Hugo de Vries's theory of mutation. He believed that de Vries, who visited Burbank's operation and praised it highly, had erred in mistaking certain hybrids for mutants. In one of his few published writings, an article titled "The Training of the Human Plant," he outlined his own theory of heredity, which was very much in the line of American neo-Lamarckian biology of the second half of the nineteenth century. Like the neo-Lamarckians, Burbank assumed the inheritance of acquired characteristics. He believed that if a plant should produce an uncommonly good fruit owing to its having been provided with the proper environment and care, the qualities of that fruit would be passed along to its descendants. "Environment is the architect of heredity," he wrote, "all characters which are transmitted have been acquired." Among Burbank's many "new creations" were the Royal and Paradox walnuts, the Primus berry—a cross between a raspberry and a dewberry—the Van Deman quince, the Paradox berry (something like a boysenberry), the "New Japan" mammoth chestnut, and the Golden plum.

A National Figure

Burbank became known through his plant catalogues (the most famous was the 1893 catalogue titled New Creations in Fruits and Flowers), through the word of mouth of satisfied customers, and through flamboyant press reports that kept him in the news throughout the first decade of the century. He was made an honorary member of the American Breeders' Association, even though most of the other members accepted Gregor Mendel's genetic principles. From 1904 through 1909 Burbank received several grants from the Carnegie Institution to support his ongoing research on hybridization. He was supported by the practical-minded Andrew Carnegie himself, over those of his advisers who objected that Burbank was not "scientific" in his methods.

Later Life

In 1912 Burbank participated in the creation of the Luther Burbank Press to promote his discoveries. Burbank had by then become a nationally prominent figure. The press and the associated Luther Burbank Society published a twelve-volume set titled Luther Bur-bank; His Methods and Discoveries and Their Practical Applications (1914-1915) setting out the results—so it was claimed—of more than one hundred thousand experiments. In the 1920s Burbank became a kind of cult figure, visited by yogis and others who claimed that his findings substantiated their theories. He became a spokesmen for "free thinkers" and was widely attacked as antireligious. His legacy is mixed. On the one hand, his rejection of modern genetics caused him to be identified as a horticultural quack; on the other, his notion of developing plants and fruits to meet the demands of market taste was far in advance of his times. Burbank died of a heart attack 24 March 1926.

Source:

Peter Dreyer, A Gardener Touched With Genius: The Life of Luther Burbank (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).