A wide-ranging and delightful narrative history of the celebrated plant breeder
Luther Burbank and the business of farm and garden in early twentieth century America
by Jane S. Smith
Copyright © 2009 Jane S. Smith
Published by The Penguin Press

From THE GARDEN OF INVENTION by Jane S. Smith
Published by arrangement with The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc.
Copyright (c) Jane S. Smith, 2009.

There are not very many agricultural celebrities. Burbank did not design gardens. He did not advocate for one diet system or another. He cared a great deal about the taste, aroma, and appearance of his creations, but he was no cook and no gourmet, either. Burbank’s talent was much more elemental. He expanded the range of plants that became the meal, the ornamental garden, and the bouquet. And he did this at a time when the vast majority of people agreed that improving on nature was, in fact, a very good thing to do.

It takes a long look back to understand why Luther Burbank was so very famous—or, to put it a slightly different way, to remember why our not-so-distant ancestors were so remarkably eager for plant improvements that they lionized the inventor of a bigger fruit, a better-yielding vegetable, or a longer-blooming flower. The modern supermarket carries a global array of fruits, vegetables, and flowers, obliterating all sense that there might be such things as regional or seasonal differences. Even markets that sell only what is locally grown by independent farmers, without pesticides or genetically modified seeds, have brimming bins stocked with an astonishing profusion of varieties, many of them brought back from the neglected corners of our great-grandparents’ gardens after having been ignored for decades as too small, too fragile, or too expensive for commercial production.

In 1905, markets offered fewer choices. There were a number of types of apples and tomatoes, but many of them didn’t taste very good or travel well. Refrigerated rail cars existed, but refrigerated trucks had not yet been invented to carry produce from the rail depot to the consumer. Two years after the Wright brothers made their historic twelve-second flight, air freight, like commercial air travel, was still very far in the future.

If you wanted to eat something out of season, something you couldn’t store in the root cellar or in an unheated pantry in the back of the kitchen, it would probably have to be canned or pickled or dried. Only a few kinds of produce could survive the trip from distant climates, and those were a luxury item reserved for the very rich. Even exotic delicacies usually came in bottles and tins. Frozen food was another marvel that wouldn’t come on the market for another twenty years. In the ornamental garden, the flowers that bloomed in the spring were gone by June, the rose was an emblem of fleeting pleasure, and hothouse flowers, like hothouse fruits, were a sign of conspicuous wealth.

Today, people debate whether it is miraculous or tragic that breeders can use genetic engineering to make better looking, hardier, more prolific, better selling crops, but nobody disputes the obvious fact that it can be done. When Luther Burbank was born in 1849, plant reproduction was a far greater mystery than the breeding of animals, and the idea of creating new kinds of plants was more common in the realms of fantasy and fiction than of fact. Over the next seventy-five years—after Darwin had popularized the idea of change as a natural process in the organic world, when the new field of genetics was just being discovered, and long before contemporary advances in molecular biology began—plant breeding was a wide-open frontier full of exciting possibilities. During those years, Luther Burbank was one of the people transforming the materials of modern farm and garden.

The story could end there, and Burbank would be remembered as a colorful pioneer of the early days of modern agriculture and horticulture: talented, productive, enormously influential, often over-promoted, and now largely forgotten. What that account would miss, however, is the way this single individual’s almost mythic reputation reflected—and still reflects—a host of contradictory attitudes about the place of human ingenuity in the natural world. Idealist and businessman, Burbank embodied both the passionate closeness to the living garden that many people today are trying to recover and the very beginnings of the large-scale manipulation of plants that has made commercial agriculture so remote from ordinary experience.

He also reminds us of a time when most people regarded “new and improved” as a phrase without irony. Burbank’s story stretched across the continent and extended through much of our national history. His father was born when George Washington was president, while his widow lived into the administration of Jimmy Carter. Still, he was unmistakably a product of his own era, the expansive commercial years between the Civil War and the Great Depression, when a plot of ground could be both a business incubator and, quite literally, a research park.

There were many other people involved in the same enterprise, of course, though few of them ever approached Burbank’s level of fame. Only a small percentage of those contemporaries could be mentioned here without turning this into an encyclopedia of agriculture, which it is not. It’s not a biography, either, if that means a thorough account of all aspects of a person’s life. This began as a book about the origins of modern garden varieties in the days before genetic engineering, and of a single charismatic breeder who was a very celebrated part of that new bounty. It quickly grew into a story about marketing and codifying nature, which led to the much larger consideration of how an earlier generation responded to the unprecedented idea that the vegetable kingdom could be mastered, directed, and even claimed as private property.

In another sense, though, this is a very ancient tale. In these pages, I use the word “garden” in the most inclusive way, to refer to any cultivated space. By business, I mean not just a way of earning a living, but also a vocation, an occupation, and even a preoccupation. Invention is another word of many meanings, encompassing everything from discovery to contrivance to bright idea.

None of these multiple meanings is at all new. As everyone since Adam has discovered, our relationship to growing things is never simple, and the ways we describe that relationship always reveal hopes and assumptions that extend far beyond a mere botanical description. Every garden is a haven but also an arena, a fertile ground for contesting ideas as well as for growing fruits and flowers. Its separation from unmediated nature is what makes it a garden, treasured for what it excludes as well as for what it contains, and the question of who controls the terrain is never very deeply buried. What made the garden of invention so very exciting was the possibility, for a time, that anyone could enter and see what might take root.

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