A century
ago, Luther Burbank was the most famous
gardener on the planet. Burbank had learned
the secrets of breeding and crossbreeding
ordinary plants from farm and garden until
they were tastier, hardier, and more
productive than ever before. His name was
inseparable from a cornucopia of new and
improved plants—fruits, nuts, vegetables and
flowers—for both home gardens and commercial
farms and orchards.
As the United States moved from a nation of
farms to a nation of city-dwellers, the
people behind the new products that
transformed daily life were admired with a
surprising fervor not accorded to their
present-day counterparts. Everyone knew and
marveled at Alexander Graham Bell’s
telephone and Thomas Edison’s electric
light. And like these other great American
inventors, Burbank was revered as an example
of the best tradition of American
originality, ingenuity, and perseverance.
The Garden of Invention is neither an
encyclopedia nor a biography. Rather, Jane
S. Smith, a noted cultural historian,
highlights significant moments in Burbank’s
fascinating life and uses them to explore
larger trends that he embodied and, in some
cases, shaped. The Garden of Invention
revisits the early years of bioengineering,
when plant inventors were popular heroes and
the public clamored for new varieties that
would extend seasons, increase yields, look
beautiful, or simply be wonderfully
different from anything seen before.
The road from the nineteenth-century farm to
twenty-first-century agribusiness is full of
twists and turns, of course, but a good part
of it passed straight through Luther
Burbank’s garden. The Garden of Invention is
a colorful and engrossing examination of the
intersection of gardening, science and
business in the years between the Civil War
and the Great Depression. |
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Jane S. Smith
received her Ph.D.
in English from Yale
University and has
taught at
Northwestern
University on topics
ranging from
twentieth-century
fiction to the
history of public
health.
"
Her history of the
first polio vaccine,
Patenting the Sun:
Polio and the Salk
Vaccine,
received the
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize for
Science and
Technology.
She has served as
commentator,
consultant and
writer for numerous
documentary film
projects.
She lives in
Chicago, where she
works in a very
small room with a
very large window. |
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