USA > California > Sonoma County > History of Sonoma County, California, with biographical sketches of the leading men and women of the county, who have been identified with its growth and development from the early days to the present time > Part 27
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On the night of April 17 the lately-elected mayor and council were ushered into office, taking the usual official oath to labor for common good and for the advancement of the municipality. Like all inaugural occasions it was rather a
COURT HOUSE, SANTA ROSA
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period of relaxation after the labor of their late campaign, and of self-congrat- ulation on their political and civic advancement. Official duties would begin on the tomorrow-only seven hours away-let it bring its own cares. It did. When the tomorrow came it landed with a jar that turned the new officials out of their beds to find their city on the crest of a tidal wave that arose and fell in its gigantic heave, rocking the old hills on their bases, and the dust-foam of its violence was mantling the sky. It turned them out to face ruin and death and the attendant ills of these twin-agents of desolation, for many weary months. And well they kept their oath of office. While San Francisco was yet sadly contemplating her piles of brick and stone, Santa Rosa was building anew. Carefully and skilfully has she been raised from the wreck of April 18, 1906, and Sonoma's county-seat stands today-April 18, 1911-physically and civicly as secure as human ingenuity can make her.
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CHAPTER XLII.
LUTHER BURBANK-TRAVELER IN PLANTLAND.
To pass from Sonoma, her wondrous fertility and her plant-life, to Luther Burbank is only a step, the mere advancing of a thought. Each humble veg- etable growth, each brilliant, queenly flower of this soil is of the kingdom of Santa Rosa's famous planter. It may be that the plant is growing as God bade it grow far back in the Third Day of Creation, but another day Burbank may stretch forth his hand, touch its life and bid it grow into another form, its petals glow in another tint. They call him "wizard"-which title he resents, calling himself only a student who has gone to school in a flower-garden. Luther Burbank will have no reference to magic, no association to wand-waving or the exorcism of genii applied to his work. As a common laborer in the field he has sought and found the secret of herb-life. There is nothing mystical in these fruit and flower achievements of which the world has heard, but after all, "Wizard" may not be an unfitting title for the man who has formed a new fruit for the tree and tinted the flower anew. "I only strive to intelligently follow natural laws and learn the secrets of the growing plant," says Mr. Bur- bank, and thus he has won for himself, and the world sliares in his victory. Nothing that can be written here of this man may be offered as news. All lands know of him, and for years all civilized nations have hastened to do him honor. Naturally seedmen, florists, nurserymen, botanists and biologists were the first to see and appreciate the importance of the work that Burbank was doing. It soon came to be no unusual thing for a noted botanist from Sweden or France to arrive one day to see Mr Burbank, followed next day by a repre- sentative of the Emperor of Japan, then by a commissioner from the Czar of Russia, and the next day by a company of distinguished German savants. The late Cecil Rhodes was thoroughly familiar with Mr. Burbank's work, and gave standing orders to the superintendent of his immense South African farms that he should procure each and every new creation that Mr. Burbank should offer, no matter what the cost.
Unique as well as wonderful are the things this man frequently does among his plant-plots. It is an old (color) gag that a blackberry is green when it is red-red when it is green-green and red when it is black, but Burbank has made the blackberry white. It took years and sixty-five thousand hybrid vines to dim the jetty tintings of nearly fifty-five centuries, but one at last produced the white berry. The pineapple-exotic of the tropic jungle-he has crossed the zones into the northern quince, and now the new pineapple-quince gives promise of being the chief jelly-fruit of the orchard. One would imagine that the rose-the empress of flowers, Flora in all her royal grandeur-is in- capable of change or re-creation, but the young Burbank Rose rivals her older sis- ters born when Eden burst into bloom. She will blossom when the plant is in tiny infancy, and if the days are not too cold will flower all the year around. She
Tumest Surdank
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is the first out of winter-quarters, is rose-pink in color shading from the center, is three inches in diameter, and was hardly out of her nursery till she won a gold medal-St. Louis Fair, 1904. He has given our dahlia the only feature long required to complete her list of perfections-a perfume, and the verbena under his tutelage exhales the odor of the trailing arbutus; while the scentless calla lily gives off the rare fragrance of the Parma violet. In the mountains of Bulgaria about two-and-one-half acres of red roses will yield each season an average of 6,600 pounds of petals from which is extracted 2.2 pounds of rose attar. This sells in the English market for a price equal to $7 or $8 an ounce. The United States consumes about $8,000,000 worth of perfumes yearly, and when our florists are breeding and harvesting the native flowers for the volatile oils in which they hold their rare, sweet fragrance, we will have no further use for the odors of Araby the Blest.
A CHILD AMID THE FLOWERS.
Luther Burbank was born in the year 1849 at Lancaster, Mass., and from earliest childhood evinced a passionate love for flowers and all forms of plant- life-the beginning of an occupation that was to make him world-known. If poverty be the nurse and incentive of genius, this boy was well equipped for after-fame, for all his earlier years his was the soul-wearing struggle to make both ends meet. Even after he had added the Burbank potato to the food-supply of the world, adding to the wealth of this nation an estimated increase of twenty millions of dollars (Burbank received $150 for the new plant), and had left Massachusetts, the home of culture and poverty, he found existence still a diffi- cult problem. Among the Marin county hills he landed, an argonaut of 1875, but there was no golden fleece awaiting him. As a laborer for his daily wage he sought among the dairies and small ranches for employment. Thirty-five years ago in California the fruit trees were not covering the land as now and this twenty-five-year old stranger, not physically strong, a nurseryman, found it hard to get a job. But industry and economy-a pair of winners in any game -brought him a patch of Sonoma county soil under a patch of Sonoma climate, and a new force entered the plant world, and a new name was seen in the realm of science. Not the name of a discoverer of a new luxury, as a new life-destroy- ing compound advertised to make war more speedy and deadly, not the name of one who has made it possible for the human voice to be heard across a con- tinent, nor the name of one who has made it possible to fly in the air or swim under the sea ; but of the man who has learned how the fruits of the earth blos- som and ripen for humanity. And not only is that man repairing the deterior- ation of time, but he is leading the plant into greater and higher results. It is no wonder the savants journey far to see the one they call the "Master of Horti- culture" in his own kingdom, nor is it any wonder that national senates arise to their feet when his name is spoken. And yet, working among his flowers and committing no other offense than disturbing some honey-hunting bee that has its own ancient ideas and methods of pollenization, Burbank has stirred up a swarm of hybrid critics,-wasps to buzz viciously around the experimental grounds. Occasionally a United States government agricultural expert from behind his roller-top desk fires an "opinion" on the work of this quiet laborer toiling among his millions of plants in Santa Rosa; and to vary the class of criticism, occasionally an American citizen publishes adverse views to those held 14
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by the eminent horticulturist, as instanced by the report several years ago of a number of Pasadena truck-gardeners, who probably could not see that Mr. Burbank was improving the market-value of carrots and cabbages. Let it be remembered that it is only in his own country that Luther Burbank's fame is less; foreign government officials have never dishonored him. But it is the unanimous verdict of horticulturists and biologists all the world over that he has added more to the number of useful plants than any other man who has lived, and that his experiments will benefit the world in all years to come. more than those of any other student of plant life. He has already added many millions of dollars to the wealth of the country in the increased value of its fruit and its vegetable and floral products. This benefit is of course increasing as his plants are more widely known. It takes a long time to produce, mature, test, propagate and introduce the increase of a single plant until people near and far can share its benefits. So the harvest of the good that Luther Burbank has done may be said scarcely to have begun, but even now it is amazing.
HOW HE MAKES HIS PLANTS GROW.
The work of plant hybridization is a mystery to many people. This brief statement of how it is accomplished may therefore be of interest: Mr. Burbank gathers a supply of anthers from the desired parent plant the day before the work of hybridization is to be done, and carefully dries them. When the anthers are dried he secures from them the fructifying pollen powder by shaking the anthers over a watch-crystal until it is covered. The blossoms of the seed par- ent that is to receive the pollen have previously been prepared by removing the anthers, leaving the pistils exposed but uninjured by the operation. Then the pollen is applied to these pistils, and the fructifying agency begins at once its journey to the ovule.
The seeds resulting from this hybridized flower are of course gathered with great care, and the closest watch kept upon them after they are planted. The little seedling may give signs of its combined parentage, or may disclose the fact that it has drawn up something from the profound depths of the converging streams of remote ancestry. These cross-bred plants are again cross-bred, and the result noted carefully, and the same process repeated until the desired suc- cess is obtained. Sometimes thousands of specimens have to be destroyed, yielding no results. It is estimated that within the past fifteen years Mr. Bur- bank has conducted fully one million experiments. The result of these is about one hundred and fifty new creations which he has deemed worthy of preserva- tion -- each of them better in some way than anything of its kind that had pre- viously existed. All the rest have been destroyed.
GIVING GOLDEN POPPY A NEW GOWN.
It is not the purpose to give here a list of the new plant changes, the new fruits and flowers Luther Burbank has created and given to mankind. The list is known, not only to the students in the science of which he is recog- nized as its greatest living exponent, but to the world at large. He has crossed the small dewberry and raspberry and the result is a new berry three and four inches in circumference, growing in clusters of a round dozen, sugared to a high jam and jelly sweetness and will fruit in a high latitude. The small, hard-shell English walnut has been changed to a soft-shell, large as a hen-
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egg, and even the wood of the tree has been improved for fine cabinet work, as well as its growth shortened to ten years, fully half of the time required for other walnut trees. Prunes and plums and vegetables have been changed and recreated, like the flowers, and these hundreds of new-forms have been given to the public. Sometimes Mr. Burbank takes a little recreation-a little recreation in a re-creation, and does a-well, funny things. As every Californian knows, the yellow poppy, the flower of the state, whose coming in early summer covers the California hills and valleys in a mantle of gold, resents handling or domestication. Blonde Eschscholtzia, born of the western plains, with the western showers in her green leaves, and the western suns in her golden chalice, boldly flaunts her vivid color in the face of "culture." However, Bur- bank-the only human being she has any reason to respect or fear-one day caught her showing a faint trace of crimson on one of her yellow petals. "Let us see if we can vary the color of Miss Poppy's gown," soliloquized the Flower Wizard. "I think she would look well in red." Then, instantly he removed the subject from her companions-he didn't want any sisterly interference from other poppies-and he watched that transplanted flower with jealous care. Its seeds were planted, and here and there on the petals of the new flowers was the red stain slightly widened. Poppy was getting a new dress. The newer seeds were planted and the Wizard watched. Nothing intruded there-no trespassers allowed-keep off the grass. Even a bee, perchance with foreign pollen on his legs, was told that he was not wanted there. When the new flowers took their places in the "show" many thousands of the great exhibition were as golden as when Mother Nature first bade them grow, and they nodded their yellow heads in saucy defiance to the Wizard who was trying to change the old, old fashion of flowers, especially of poppies, which had ever been true to ancestral life. But they noted among the blonde poppies many whose dresses were more red than yellow, and that startled and angered them. Some of the floral sisterhood were growing frivolous and changeable. Pro- fessor Eschscholtz had not interfered with their color or habits, but had only given them a name; and this Mr. Burbank was changing their very looks so that when they returned to their native hills their own family wouldn't know them. But the reddening process went on for eight years. Poppy fought hard for her old habits, old colors, old clothes, but she was only matter, and mind was bending her to its purpose. In every succeeding generation she appeared redder and redder. Poor Poppy. Whenever a flower showed yellow-the loyal vel- low, the Wizard instantly removed her, and only poppies with the hybrid tint were permitted to grow there. She was thrown in contact with other poppies- "Papavers"-one the Wizard called "Papaver Somniferum" (the opium poppy), and the odor from this white cousin made her sleepy. The Wizard was work- ing year by year with these other poppies, too, and changing them to a variety of forms and colors. In fact it seemed to Poppy that he could do anything he pleased with a flower; could enlarge it as the Shasta Daisy; tint it at will as with a prism one resolves the solar white light into its seven primary colors. So Poppy shed her gold and became a bloom of deep lustrous red. Then the wrathy Californians protested against the act that lost the golden state her golden flower. What next would this indefatigable man of magic do? Dim the golden California sunshine and change the long golden summers to the
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leaden line of an castern season,-and ruin the stock-argument of the railroad transportation agent; or turn twenty dollar pieces into base-metal and wreck the financial-foundation of the commonwealth. But Mr. Burbank smiled and looked out on the hillsides where the yellow floral mantle yet waves like the mighty oriflamme of a marching host, and said, "Peace! I have left them there, just as Eschscholtz left them." And the enchanted Poppy, her cup emptied of its native gold and filled with the red blood of wizardry, is fated to be an exile, a pampered pet in the gardens of culture. Nevermore will she race a floral-hoiden with the wild, yellow-sisterhood in mad flight over the California plains, when Flora calls her maidens into flower.
THE THORNLESS OPUNTIA.
Burbank's most astounding achievement and the one most fraught with importance, is his spineless cactus. It is the estimate of eminent scientific authorities that the waste places of the world-the great deserts of Sahara and Obi, and the lesser ones of Nevada, Southern California and Arizona-may be planted to this cactus, and made to yield sufficient food to sustain four times the present population of the world. This statement will have little meaning to the reader who has not seen a desert; and the reader who knows what a desert is will have to think several minutes to grasp the immensity of the state- ment. The world's waste places, that now produce nothing, made to yield four times enough food for all the world's population !
Burbank made this cactus by crossing the giant prickly pear of the Amer- ican desert with a small, spineless cactus sent to him from Central America. The little cactus bore a very small fruit of fine flavor; the large one bristled with spines long and sharp as needles. The cross has no thorns, but bears a delicious fruit larger than an apple. Not only the fruit is edible, but the stems and leaves. One robust plant produces more than a quarter of a ton of food for either man or beast. The desert land of the globe is estimated to be 2,700,- 000,000 acres, an area larger than the United States including the insular pos- sessions by 6,000 miles. The semi-arable lands of the globe are estimated at 9,000,000,000 square miles additional. Practically, all of this, as well as the desert lands, save with little exception, may, with the spineless cactus, be reclaimed for food. The fertile acres of this planet-16,000,000,000 of them- will of course produce more and with greater rapidity than the desert lands. The population of the globe is estimated at something like 1,500,000,000, and Mr. Burbank holds that this "may be doubled and yet, in the immediate food of the cactus plant itself and in the food animals which may be raised upon it, there would still be enough food for all."
In several countries there are certain kinds of cactus having few or no thorns, and these when considered edible are used for food. Even where there are no thorns, the woody fibrous skeletons of the leaves make them more or less indigestible. These overcome, the development of the fruit and leaves for food for man and beast must be accomplished. Mr. Burbank has worked among these lines, and breeding in the good and out the bad, rather than seeking to create a wholly new plant. In one sense, the cactus he has produced is new because it possesses excellencics, devoid of obnoxious elements, found in no other cactus. From the five genera of the plant common in this country he went to work, seeding and crossing for years to break up for all time the habits
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of millions of years. It was discouraging. The "prickly pear" is not a modest little violet ready for floral-matrimony, nor a "primrose on the river-brim." It is a tough proposition wherever found, and Mr. Burbank's subjects for civili- zation not only refused to be improved and made nice, gentle, stickerless plants, but in many cases grew more thorny and more worthless than before. When Mr. Burbank thought he had a fine, promising young cactus well on the road to a spineless career, and he planted its seeds for further culture, up would sprout a new plant that fairly bristled with spines and thorns-reverting to an original type resembling a mad porcupine. But those showing change and improvement were selected and the fight went on. The systematic hybridiza- tion and selection began to win and after ten years' struggle a great cactus eight feet in height, its big fruit-bearing thalli or leaves without a thorn or spicule showing, was growing in the grounds-the heretofore invincible plant of the lifeless desert won by science to the uses of its conqueror, man.
11E HAS MADE THE CACTUS SHED ITS THORNS.
The fruit of the new cactus is about two and a quarter inches wide by three and a half inches long. Color is yellow, and it is delicious to the taste. Like any food first eaten, its flavor is different. To some it tastes like a peach, to others a melon, a pineapple, a blackberry. It may be eaten fresh, cooked or preserved. The leaves have an attractive flavor when cooked, and may be cooked in many ways, or may be preserved as melon or ginger rinds are so handled. The new cactus, when it is finished and ready for its life-work- the work it will do all down the coming countless ages-will not be raised to sell. It will be free for the billions of acres lying waste and useless on the surface of the globe. So this tireless man seeking subjects for his life-labor has gone down into the desert where nothing grows but the cactus, the pariah of the vegetable kingdom; the plant that covers its leaves with deadly barbs fearing that some starving creature will find a morsel of food thereon; a tree preserving an eternal hostility to all living things except to the rattlesnake or scorpion within its shade-if it ever casts a shade in its hellish habitat. There he has attacked this stubborn, irreconcilable thing,-stripped the coat of spikes from its body, taught it to produce edible fruit for beast,-in fact he has broken up the habits of billions of seasons and set it in the ways of usefulness. Any man with a few feet of earth in some village-home, or with a garden in the country, or with farms which have lost their fertility, or with large areas of desert or mountain lands, may become a sharer in the fruits of this act. For here, as in all he has ever done, the supreme purpose of his life looms up, colossal in its contrast with the mean selfishness of man. All his work is for humanity. If he can produce or improve a fruit or flower that will benefit or brighten the life of his fellow, he is satisfied. He only wants the world to be better for his having lived in it. Yet to many of his own countrymen Burbank is unknown,-though this may not be to his injury. In a distant part of this state, the progressive real estate dealers proclaim that he lives in their neigh- borhood, and not a few accept the statement. In Europe, Asia, Africa, and in the Antipodes, whence they send scientists to learn of this man his wonderful methods, they know. In the far empires where shotted guns frown across the frontiers and where the genius of man is bent to the preparation of more direct means of destruction, they know. In the famine-blighted plains where human-
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ity starves and dies till the only product of their fields is a harvest of the dead, they know. In the new places newly mapped for immigration and civilization, they know of the laborer among his plants on the rim of the western hemi- sphere striving to assist the weary, old world to provide food for its fifteen hundred millions inhabitants. When the industrious explorers of the United States Government were scouring the desert places of the earth in search of a thornless cactus which they thought might be introduced into the arid regions of America, and finding at last in Algeria a prickly pear almost spineless, Bur- bank had been for years cultivating tens of thousands of cacti upon his grounds in Santa Rosa, U. S .; thousands of 'them at that very time practically thorn- less and spiculeless, and all moving forward under his direction to produce a plant that should have for all time only the things desired. Hugo de Vries, the eminent Dutch botanist, who visited Burbank in 1904, said of him :
"The flowers and fruits of California are less wonderful than the flowers and fruits that Mr. Burbank has made. He is a great and unique genius. Thc desire to see what he has done was the chief motive of my coming to America. He has carried on the breeding and selection of plants to definite ends. Such a knowledge of Nature and such ability to handle plant-life would be possible only to one possessing genius of a high order."
HAS WORKED ALONE-AND MISUNDERSTOOD.
David Starr Jordan, president of Leland Stanford University, adds this. tribute to the laurels that have come to Santa Rosa's honored citizen: "In his field of the application of our knowledge of heredity, selection and crossing to the development of plants, he stands unique in the world. No one else, whatever his appliances, has done as much as Burbank, or disclosed as much of the laws governing these phenomena. He has worked for years alone, not understood and not appreciated, at a constant financial loss, and for this reason,- that his instincts and purposes are essentially those of a scientific man, not of a nurseryman, nor even of a horticulturist. To have tried fewer experiments and all of a kind likely to prove economically valuable, and finally to have exploited these as a nurseryman, would have brought him more money. In his own way, Luther Burbank belongs in the class of Faraday and the long array of self-taught great men who lived while the universities were spending their strength in fine points of grammar and hazy conceptions of philosophy. His work is already an inspiration to botanists as well as horticulturists, and his methods are yielding rich results in the hands of others. Scientific men belong to many classes; some observe, some compare, some think, and some carry knowledge into action. There is need for all kinds and a place for all. With a broader opportunity. Burbank could have done a greater variety of things and touched life at more points; but at the same time, he would have lost something of his simple intensity and fine delicacy to touch,-things which the schools do not always give and which too much contact with men some- times take away.
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