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Show i He Taught Plants to Grow 1 pEOPLE called him a magician, but Luther Burbank always called himself a teacher. He taught ugly plants to be pretty, and pretty plants to be strong. He was born a hundred years ago, in 1849, in New England. As a boy, he loved the out-of-doors, and learned how Nature makes new fruits, flowers, vegetables. Bees, birds, and winds carry pollen pol-len between two plants. Sometimes, Some-times, a different kind of seed is developed, maybe a new kind of plant altogether. Usually it takes a long time, hundreds of years! And the new plants aren't much i better than the old ones. . Young Luther wanted to help Nature work quicker and better. He wanted to make plants grow bigger and faster, never get sick, have finer taste and color and smell, live in all kinds of weather, be easy to ship long distances. And he figured out a way to do all that. It sounds simple, but it was mighty hard work! First, he got some good plants. He carried pollen from one to another, an-other, waited for seed, planted the seed, and grew other plants. He examined the growing young plants carefully. Some might grow too slow, others might be crippled by insects, or have poor smell or color, or a taste that didn't suit him. These went to a big bonfire. bon-fire. Burbank never wasted time or space on a plant with the least little thing wrong He saved any plants that were a 1 little better than the parent-plant. As these got bigger, he exchanged their pollen again, and grew still other plants. Every day, he'd hunt for more poor plants to destroy, more good ones to save. For Burbank, a plant couldn't be just new or better. It had to be perfect. Often, years would pass before he found what he wanted. Burbank waited seven years for a pea, 11 years for a berry, 32 years for a plum! Once he grew 499,999 different plants before he was satisfied. sat-isfied. He kept records of every parent plant, every seed, every young plant. -When he finally did get a perfect fruit or flower, he knew exactly which plants had produced it. From the same parent plants, he grew more plants. He tested them for a long time, to see If they'd keep on producing perfect young plants. If they did, he'd sell them to farmers and fruit growers and gardeners. Fruit trees generally take six or seven years to give fruit, but Burbank Bur-bank taught them to do it in one or two years. He'd graft or tie a new young tree onto a branch of an old tree, with special wax. The young tree would grow right on with the old one, and give fruit years ahead of time. Burbank had 3,000 experiments going on all the time. Altogether, he produced 220 new fruits, veg- . etables, flowers, vines, nuts, and trees more than any other person per-son in the world. W7HEN he grew famous, hundreds hun-dreds of people came to California Cali-fornia to see him, to admire his fields and orchards, to buy his plants. Burbank's time was supposed sup-posed to be worth a hundred dollars dol-lars a minute, but he liked visitors, vis-itors, and always took them around his place. Quite a sight it was too. A cactus-plant, without thorns, that could live without water for a year was grown for Australia, where there hadn't been rain and the sheep couldn't get enough to eat. A red flower that had once been yellow, and a white blackberry, black-berry, biggest and juciest ever grown. Thornless blackberries, easy to pick, and cherries that ripened rip-ened even in winter. Plums and prunes without stones, twice as big and juicy. A plumcot a fruit that was plum and apricot combined! com-bined! The Shasta daisy, big, bright-white, gorgeous. Apples on a pear tree, pears on an apple tree, and a potato-tomato plant! "Saves time and space," Burbank Bur-bank would explain. "Potatoes grow below ground, tomatoes above. I get both from the same plant. Over here's a tree with 500 different kinds of cherries on it. This tree has 256 different kinds of apples I'm trying out." |
