Soil and Health Library

Soil and Health Library This document is a reproduction of the book or other copyrighted material you requested. It was prepared on Friday, 31 Mar, 2017 for the exclusive use of Ben Garrison, whose email address is [email protected]. This reproduction was made by the Soil and Health Library only for the purpose of research and study. Any further reproduction or distribution of this copy in any form whatsoever constitutes a violation of copyrights. PARTNER OF NATURE BY LUTHER BURBANK Edited and transcribed by WILBUR HALL To the end of his life Luther Burbank was a naturalist and a lover of the wilderness. This late picture shows him relaxing while on a mountain trail. He did not put on his "Sunday suit" to be photographed; these were the clothes he wore all his life-gray or black suit, stiff shirt, collar and cravat. Even in his gardens and at his grubbiest job he seldom changed. D. APPLETON-CENTURY COMPANY Incorporated New York London 1939 COPYRIGHT, 1939, BY D. APPLETON-CENTURY COMPANY, INC. All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission of the publisher Foreword IN his lifetime Luthur Burbank wrote or dictated many thousands of pages about his work with plants and the methods he employed in plant-breeding and improvement. Much of this material was published, but either in piecemeal articles that presented only phases of his work or his experiences or in sets of books that covered the whole field and offered more than the average reader required. There were always requests for a single volume, written in non-technical language, that would cover the subject adequately--in short, for a compact and simple story of how Mr. Burbank went about his work of producing more useful plants, more desirable fruits and more beautiful flowers. Since Mr. Burbank's death in 1926 these requests have increased. But it was a formidable task. There was so much material to sift and winnow in order to reduce the whole chronicle to so limited a space. It was my husband's own story, that must be told in his own words, yet what he had written had to be condensed into a smooth narrative. However, the work was undertaken, under my supervision; it is here offered you, completed. The experiences, theories, laws, methods and formulas set down are entirely Mr. Burbank's. The text closely follows what he wrote and dictated and said on the subject, though the "boiling down" process results in a transcription of Mr. Burbank's voluminous material rather than literal, word-for-word quotations. And, reading the manuscript, I am glad that this plan was followed, for Mr. Hall, who collaborated with Mr. Burbank during his lifetime, has a happy faculty for presenting him and his enthusiasms and adventures and work in almost the very words my husband would have used. One of the sources for this transcription of my husband's writings was the eight- volume work, How Plants Are Trained to Work for Man, published in 1921 by P. F. Collier and Son Company, whose kind permission to refer to this work in preparing Partner of Nature is here gratefully acknowledged. It is my hope that the work done on this volume will be justified by the interest it arouses, not only in Luther Burbank's experiences and methods, but in Luther Burbank as a naturalist-a true "Partner of Nature." ELIZABETH WATERS BURBANK Santa Rosa, California Contents A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 1. THE PRINCIPLES OF PLANT-BREEDING 2. THE ROMANCE OF STRUGGLE 3. THE RIVALRY OF PLANTS 4. NEW FLOWERS AND NEW COLORS 5. HARNESSING HEREDITY 6. BREAKING THE RULES 7. PLANNING A NEW PLANT 8. GOALS ACHIEVED 9. INTERESTING FAILURES 10. FIXING GOOD TRAITS 11. BUILDING A NEW FRUIT 12. OUR FRIENDLY FRUIT TREES 13. THE PLUM 14. MORE ABOUT PLUMS 15. THE PLUMCOT 16. THE BERRY PATCH 17. THE MOST WONDERFUL THING IN THE WORLD 18. IN THE VEGETABLE GARDEN 19. HAND-MADE FLOWERS 20. FLOWER FAMILY-TREES 21. OUR BIGGEST PLANTS 22. PRACTICAL POLLENIZATION 23. INGENIOUS COÖPERATORS 24. SEEDLING PROPAGATION 25. GRAFTING AND BUDDING A WORD IN CLOSING The Life of Luther Burbank LUTHER BURBANK was born March 7, 1849, the thirteenth child of Samuel Walton Burbank, whose forebears had been in New England since before 1640, and the third child of Samuel's third wife, Olive Ross, whose family traced its descent from the blood of Scottish kings. His birthplace--a large brick house with a wooden ell--stood on the sloping land that runs down from the old town of Lancaster, in Massachusetts, to the Nashua River. It was a house that threw its doors open hospitably to the learned, the cultured, and the scholarly who came that way or who lived--as many of them did--in the near vicinity. It was a house that heard many discussions of deep theological problems, of politics, of abstruse questions of philosophy and ethics; it was, moreover, the house of a successful and able father and a mother who was above even the high New England average of mentality and ability. It was a good house in which to be born. There are many stories told of Luther Burbank's childhood that sound very much as though they had been suggested by his later career: the story, for instance, that as a mere baby his favorite plaything was a potted cactus plant; the story that he cried when flowers wilted or fell apart; the story that he instructed his mother how to plant and cultivate her garden when he was at an age when most youngsters are absorbed in teething. He himself tells of trying an experiment before he could walk, the experiment being the substitution of his chubby fist for doughnut dough in a kettle of boiling fat; he remembered in later life, too, that, while the rest of the family were picking strawberries one day and he was set in the field to amuse himself, he was delighted as well as alarmed by a big crow that tried to eat his pink toes. Whatever may the truth regarding his infantile interest in Nature it is unquestionable that his mind was bent and strongly influenced by the sober and thoughtful discussions he heard as he was growing up, and particularly and markedly by the long walks and talks he had with a cousin of his father's, Professor Levi Sumner Burbank, a personal friend of Louis Agassiz, a sound geologist, and a member of most of the learned societies that, at that time, were in existence in Boston. It is agreed that he was a timid and sensitive child, which was partly traceable to the fact that he was of a delicate physique and so denied participation in the rougher sports of the other boys. But he was by no means diffident, nor soft; he played well the games he was strong enough for; he was a good skater; he was inventive and tireless in finding out the why of things; as he grew a little older he made himself liked and a sort of leader by figuring out short cuts in lesson-getting and acceptable excuses for having fun. Public recitation was his principal bugaboo, and "speaking a piece" utter misery for him. When he was entered at the Lancaster Academy, and by a sensible principal excused from declamation and permitted instead to write a composition, school lost most of its terrors for him and he became a successful student. Meantime he had shown unmistakable aptitude for mechanics, experimenting with a tea-kettle until he made it operate a tin whistle; advancing from that stage to a cylinder-and-piston engine; perfecting that until it was practicable enough to run a small boat. He built water-wheels and set them to driving toys; he worked out labor- saving devices for his mother; he even planned a theoretical improvement on the process of brick-making, led to this by the fact that his father and uncle had turned their early pottery works into a brick-yard. His father began to think that Luther was wasting himself as a small and rather weak hand in the work of the home--the orchard, the timber-lot and the brick-yard; as there were plenty of older children who were rugged and capable, the youngster was at last apprenticed to the Ames Manufacturing Company with the belief that he would develop into a mechanical engineer and inventor. The guess was not far off, for the boy soon contrived a labor- saving device for the machine on which he was employed at turning plowrounds which multiplied the efficiency of both machine and operator many times over and which increased young Burbank's daily wage from a few cents to eight and ten dollars. But the confinement and dust of the factory told on the fragile youth and, after his father's death, when he was about seventeen, he took the small patrimony that fell to him and, against the advice of family and friends, bought a seventeen-acre tract of fine land near Lunenburg, a few miles from Lancaster, and became a truck-gardener. It was the beginning of his real lifework. Always groping about for an understanding of life and especially of the life of growing plants, Luther Burbank found his path brilliantly lighted by the first writings of Charles Darwin; what Darwin stated theoretically concerning the influence of environment on the heredity of all growing things the young gardener in Lunenburg began to demonstrate practically.

Load more