Luther Burbank, Botanist, Horticulturalist and Plant Science Pioneer
Born in Lancaster, Massachusetts in 1849, Luther Burbank was a botanist, horticulturist and a pioneer in agricultural science. His objective was to improve the quality of plants and thereby increase the world's food supply. In his working career Burbank introduced more than 800 new varieties of plants including over 200 varieties of fruits, many vegetables, nuts and grains, and hundreds of ornamental flowers.
Burbank grew up on a farm and received only an elementary school education. The thirteenth of fifteen children, he enjoyed the plants in his mother's large garden. His father died when he was 21 years old, and Burbank used his inheritance to buy a 17-acre plot of land near Lunenburg, where he developed the Burbank potato. Burbank sold the rights to the Burbank potato for $150 and used the money to travel to Santa Rosa, California, in 1875. His potato was introduced in Ireland to combat the potato blight epidemic. Today, the Russet Burbank potato (sometimes also called the Idaho potato) is the most widely cultivated potato in the United States. A large percentage of McDonald's french fries are made from this cultivar.
Burbank's most successful strains and varieties include the Shasta daisy, the Fire poppy, the July Elberta peach, the Santa Rosa plum, the Flaming Gold nectarine, Royal Walnuts, the Wickson plum, Robusta strawberries, Elephant garlic, the Freestone peach, the white blackberry and many more. Burbank developed more than 800 strains and varieties of plants.
The Shasta Daisy
The Wickson Plum
Photo by Peggy Greb / USDA ARS.
The Freestone Peach
Burbank experimented with a variety of techniques such as grafting, hybridization, and cross-breeding. By all accounts, Burbank was a kindly man who wanted to help other people. He was very interested in education and gave money to the local schools. He married twice: to Helen Coleman in 1890, which ended in divorce in 1896; and to Elizabeth Waters in 1916. He had no children.
In a speech given to the First Congregational Church of San Francisco in 1926, Burbank said:
"I love humanity, which has been a constant delight to me during all my seventy-seven years of life; and I love flowers, trees, animals, and all the works of Nature as they pass before us in time and space. What a joy life is when you have made a close working partnership with Nature, helping her to produce for the benefit of mankind new forms, colors, and perfumes in flowers which were never known before; fruits in form, size, and flavor never before seen on this globe; and grains of enormously increased productiveness, whose fat kernels are filled with more and better nourishment, a veritable storehouse of perfect food--new food for all the world's untold millions for all time to come."
Burbank's work spurred the passing of the 1930 Plant Patent Act four years after his death. The legislation made it possible to patent new varieties of plants (excluding tuber-propagated plants). In supporting the legislation, Thomas Edison testified before Congress and said that "This [bill] will, I feel sure, give us many Burbanks."
