For many years, Luther Burbank was among the best-liked
Americans of his day. It wasn’t until the last year of his life
that he fell into disfavor with many of the public.
For many years, Luther Burbank was among the best-liked Americans of his day. It wasn’t until the last year of his life that he fell into disfavor with many of the public.
As the nation’s foremost horticulturist he produced more than 800 species of fruit, vegetables, grain, nuts, grasses and ornamental flowers.
He was the 13th of his parents’ 15 children and grew up in Lancaster, Mass., where he was born in 1849. From his boyhood he loved plants. In fact, according to contemporary accounts, he seemed to love everything: his fellow humans, animals, nature and, most of all, knowledge. He pursued it during his school career and was greatly influenced by Charles Darwin and other free thinkers of the 19th century. He credited Darwin’s natural selection philosophy as the inspiration for his experiments.
Upon his father’s death, Luther tried farming to sustain the family. He reaped excellent crops and felt there were probably ways to improve them. America was still a largely agrarian culture and any method of improving or increasing crops was highly lauded.
In his early 20s he developed the Burbank Potato. The great potato famine of the 1840s had seen tens of thousands of Ireland’s residents starve to death. The Burbank Potato was blight-resistant and stabilized that nation’s agriculture.
Burbank sold the rights to it for $150, the amount needed to establish himself in California. He loved Santa Rosa immediately and set up a nursery. It was a great success because his genius produced plants that were unlike anything ever seen before. But he sold it within a few years and established an experimental farm.
For the next 55 years he worked in his great outdoor laboratory. He created bigger and better plants than anyone had ever known, and many for special purposes. His spineless cactus provided food for cattle and he developed a blackberry bush without thorns. Because he also loved beauty, he created the Shasta Daisy.
His fame made him a public institution. Officials called upon him to greet important personages visiting the state. He thus became a friend of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. He and blind Helen Keller established an immediate glad rapport: “She saw my world through my eyes, and I, hers through her fingers.”
In the last year of his life his reaction to two major events turned many admirers unto bitter detractors. The first was the Scopes trial in Tennessee when a teacher was prosecuted for teaching evolution in his class. Burbank, who previously had kept his freethinking views private, spoke out: “Those who would legislate against teaching evolution should also legislate against gravity and electricity… and should introduce a clause to prevent the use of the telescope and microscope or any other instrument used for the discovery of truth.”
His reaction to Henry Ford’s endorsement of reincarnation shattered his reputation in the minds of many. Burbank wrote that he believed that death was the end of human life, and described himself to the press as an “infidel” or unbeliever.
That was in January of 1926, and over the next few months he was deluged with mail, much of it angry and some threatening. He tried to answer every letter without rancor but each day brought more, and his system proved unequal to the task. He died on April 11 that year at 77.
Today, when most of his detractors have long since been forgotten, schools, school districts and even banks are named for him. Santa Rosa has honored him with a Luther Burbank Rose Parade for the past 109 years.
But of all the laurels given him the one he might have preferred above all others was that California made his birthday – today, March 7 – Arbor Day; a time for people to plant trees and perpetuate life.
