Note 207 — Chapter III · LEADING VARIETIES OF PLUMS.

Luther Burbank, known the world over for his work in bringing into being new plant forms, was born in Lancaster, Massachusetts, March 7, 1849. He was educated in the common schools and in the local academy, his school-training being supplemented by much reading in the well-stocked library of which every New England town boasts. After leaving school, some time was spent in a factory in Worcester, Massachusetts, but, following a strong natural inclination to work with plants, he left the factory to grow vegetables and seeds. It was while so engaged that he grew the Burbank potato, most widely known and most valuable, if gauged by the monetary value of the crops produced, of all of his new plants. In 1875 Mr. Burbank went to California and a few years later began in a small way the plant-breeding nursery at Santa Rosa in which most of his work has since been done. The years preceding this beginning and several following it constitute a time of hard labor, sickness and of financial distress through which only a man of remarkable strength of character could have lived and kept the desire to continue his work. Following a decade, more or less, of difficulties after the start at Santa Rosa, Mr. Burbank’s career as a world-wide figure in plant-breeding may be said to have begun. One cannot briefly catalog the new forms of plants that have gone forth from his private place in California; they must number well into the hundreds; his biographer, in 1905, said that Mr. Burbank has worked with over two thousand five hundred distinct species (Harwood, W. S., New Creations in Plant Life 1. 1905). Among these have been practically all of the species of plums now under cultivation, from which have been obtained, according to Mr. Burbank, hundreds of thousands of plum-seedlings of which the breeder has selected a score or more of very distinct sorts, all interesting and a few of them very valuable. The many other fruits, flowers and forage plants which Mr. Burbank has sent out, each involving the handling of countless seedlings, cannot be mentioned here. Nor can his methods and results be discussed, except to say that in them he is a unique figure in plant-breeding and that they have been such that he has exercised a powerful influence toward the improvement of plants. The practical results of Mr. Burbank’s work have been as great or greater than those secured by any other person in plant-breeding, yet they have been magnified out of all bounds in the popular press and his work has been caricatured by calling the man a wizard and ascribing to him occult knowledge. Of the plants introduced by Mr. Burbank the proportion of really valuable commercial ones seems now to be small, but what he has done cannot be measured by money values; he has awakened universal interest in plant-breeding; has demonstrated that things unheard of before his time can be done with plants; and, all in all, his contributions in new forms of plants to horticulture and agriculture, in their intrinsic and educational value, make him the master worker of the times in improving plants.