BURBANK, Luther, American naturalist, author and plant originator: b. Lancaster, Worcester County, Mass., 7 March 1849; of English-Scotch ancestry; educated in the com mon schools and local academy; worked as a boy for the Ames Plow Company, agricultural implement manufacturers, Worcester, Mass., where he exhibited marked inventive abilities, but soon began market-gardening and seed raising in a small way, developing the well known Burbank potato in 1873; removed to Santa Rosa, Cal., 1 Oct. 1875, where he has since resided and carried on his work. His many and important (new of fruits, flowers, vegetables, timber trees, grains and grasses have made him the best known plant originator in the world. The characteristics which are the special factors in the success of his work are, the large extent of his experi ments, his keenness of perception of slight variations in plant qualities and the rapidity with which he develops new qualities, this rapidity being due to a combination of multiple hybridizing, selection and grafting of seedling plants on mature stocks, so that immediate re sults as to flowers and fruits are obtained from seedling stems. But the final and most import ant factor in Burbank's success is the inherent personal genius of the man, whose innate sympathy with nature, aided by the practical education in plant biology derived from 50 years of constant study and experiment, enable him to perceive correlations and outcomes of plant growth which seem to have been visible to no other man. As the history of Burbank's life is the history of his work, the remainder of his biographical sketch may advantageously be devoted to a brief consideration of the character and method of creation of some of his principal new plant varieties. Burbank has originated introduced ntroduced a remarkable series of plums and prunes. No less than 60 varieties are in cluded in his list of offerings, and some of them, notably the Gold, Wickson, Apple, Oc tober, Chalco, America, Climax, Formosa, Bart lett, Santa Rosa and Beauty plums and the Splendor, Sugar, Giant and Standard prunes are among the best known and most successful kinds now grown. He has also perfected a stoneless prune, the Abundance, and has created an absolutely new species, the plumcot, by a combination of the common plum and the apri cot. The Sugar and Standard prunes promise to supplant the French prune in California. The Bartlett plum, cross of the bitter Chinese simoni and the Delaware, a Burbank hybrid, has the exact fragrance and flavor of the Bart lett pear. The Climax is a cross of the simoni and the Japanese triflora. The Chinese simoni produces almost no pollen, but few grains of it ever having been obtained, but these few grains have enabled Burbank to revolutionize the whole plum shipping industry. Most of Burbank's plums and prunes are the result of multiple crossings, in which the Japanese vari eties have played an important part. Hundreds of thousands of seedlings have been grown and carefully worked over in his 40 years' experi ments with plums and single trees have been made to carry as many as 600 varying seedling grafts.
Burbank has originated and introduced the Van Deman, Santa Rosa, Alpha, Pineapple, "No. Dazzle and other quinces; the Leader, Opulent and National peaches, cross-bred from the Muir, Wager and White nectarine; the Winterstein and Goldridge apples; and has made interesting, although not profitable, 'crosses of the peach and almond, and plum and almond.
Next in extent, probably, to his work with plums is his long and successful experimenta tion with berries. This work has extended through 35 years of constant attention, has in volved the use of over 50 different species of Rubus, and has resulted in the origination and introduction of 10 new commercial varieties, mostly obtained through various hybridizations of dewberries, blackberries and raspberries. Among these may especially be mentioned the Phenomenal, a hybrid of the Western dewberry (R. ursinus) and the Red raspberry (R. ideaus), fixed in the first generation, which ripens its main crop far ahead of most raspberries and blackberries, and the berry is of enormous pro portions and exquisite quality; the Iceberg, a cross-bred white blackberry derived from a hybridization of the Crystal White (pistillate parent) with the Lawton (staminate parent) and with beautiful snow-white berries so nearly transparent that the small seeds may be seen in them; the Balloon berry, selected from a complicated cross of many species; the Hima laya, the most rapid growing and by far the most productive blackberry in existence, of unequalled quality and of great value in Cali fornia and other mild climates; also a wonder ful series of absolutely thornless blackberries of great productiveness and superior quality. The thornless berry has not yet been generally introduced, but will no doubt supplant the thorny varieties nearly everywhere. An inter esting feature of Mr. Burbank's brief account, in his "New Creations" catalogue of 1894, of the berry experimentation, is a reproduction of a photograph showing "a sample pile of brush 12 feet wide, 14 feet high and 20 feet long, containing 65,000 two- and three-year-old seedling berry bushes (40,000 Blackberry X Raspberry hybrids and 25,000 Shaffer X Gregg hybrids) all dug up with their crop of ripening berries)) The photograph is introduced to give the reader some idea of the work neces sary to produce a satisfactory new race of berries. "Of the 40,000 Blackberry-Raspberry hybrids of this kind (Paradox) is the only one now in existence. Prom the other 25,000 hybrids two dozen bushes were reserved for further trial' Leaving Burbank's other fruit and berry creations unmentioned, we may refer to his curious cross-bred walnut results, the most astonishing of which is a hybrid between Juglans californica (staminate parent) and J. regia (pistillate parent), which grows with an amazing vigor and rapidity, the trees in creasing in size at least twice as fast as the combined growth of both parents, and the clean-cut, glossy, bright-green leaves, from two to three feet long, having a sweet odor like that of apples. This hybrid produces no nuts, but curiously enough the result of a nearly similar hybridization (i.e., pollen from nigra on pistils of californica) produces in abundance large nuts of a quality superior to that pos sessed by either parent. These new species of walnut are now known as "Paradox)) and °Royal' respectively.