Luther Bur bank 55 



has a mixed flavour of peach, melon, and pineapple. A 

 single Burbank cactus plant three years old produced six 

 hundred pounds of food, for the leaves candied like lemon 

 rind or ginger were found to be delicious, or they could be 

 boiled to provide a vegetable. 



Burbank has taken roses, blackberries, and gooseberries 

 and induced all these plants to shed their thorns. At the 

 same time he has improved their fruits both in size and 

 flavour. He has created a white blackberry that is large, 

 luscious in flavour, and beautiful to look at. It is com- 

 pletely thornless. You can rub the stalk against your 

 cheek and find it smooth as velvet. 



His experiments with the poppy were amazing. He 

 took the common garden poppy, which is an annual, 

 crossed it with the Oriental poppy, which is a perennial, 

 and produced a new race of poppies of wondrous beauty 

 and size. In the course of this work he had at one time 

 in his garden two thousand poppy plants not merely 

 unlike in colour and habit of growth, but resembling in 

 form and foliage nearly every order of plant known. The 

 perfect poppy which he eventually evolved had a bloom 

 ten inches across. 



The useful walnut has one disadvantage in that it is a 

 very slow-growing tree. Burbank created a new walnut 

 which, at thirteen years old, was six times the size of the 

 average twenty-eight-year-old walnut-tree. He tackled 

 the Spanish chestnut, and produced a dwarf tree which 

 began to bear a crop of nuts at eighteen months old and 

 when it was only three feet high. 



He turned his attention to that common inhabitant 

 of all gardens, the rhubarb plant. Rhubarb, as every 

 gardener knows, is only fit for use in spring and early 

 summer, but Burbank has grown a rhubarb which yields 

 every day in the year and whose stalks are of excellent 

 quality. Its size may be judged from the fact that the 

 leaves average four feet in length by three across. This 



