IDEAL SURROUNDINGS FOR THE PLANT BREEDER. 



Dr. Walter Van Fleet standing beside his selected chestnut trees in his little plant 

 breeding garden near Bell, Maryland. Eight acres of land are all he cultivates and he 

 is able because he lives within a stone's throw of it to be among his plants when they are in 

 flower before sunrise and before the bees have visited the blooms. (Fig. 7.) 



required an expedition to get to his 

 garden by daybreak. What charmed 

 me when I first knew Luther Burbank 

 was the fact that he had around his 

 doorstep and in his backyard the plants 

 he was breeding, and, that, weak phy- 

 sically as he was, he could work among 

 his plants in the early morning before the 

 people who came to see him were up. 

 This was before the factory and pub- 

 lication bureau built a building and 

 thoroughly commercialized his work. 

 1 wonder if he does not often look 

 back to the quiet pleasure of those 

 mornings. 



OBSTACLES TO PLANT BREEDING 



Sometimes it seems as though every- 

 thing were against the plant breeder — ■ 

 every tendency in modern times. The 

 commercial emoluments are few, for as 

 soon as he tries to commercialize his new 

 hybrid, he is obliged to develop a selling 

 organization and has to step into quite 

 another world — that of glowing exag- 

 geration and the trials of employing 



many people, both of them activities 

 which crowd out the time for concen- 

 tration which the breeder requires, and, 

 as they come in the spring, often interfere 

 seriously with his breeding work. The 

 result is he is generally tied up with some 

 other organization, which, because of 

 expense involved, gives him a room in a 

 big building and a corner of some field 

 used for other purposes; or, and this is 

 even worse, he is put in charge of a 

 botanic garden and a lot of professional 

 gardeners, or an office full of busy clerks 

 who insist on being directed, or a class- 

 room full of boys who are interested in 

 anything but plants and who delight in 

 worrying the professor. The breeding 

 work is a side issue, in any case — the 

 teaching or directing or advising is what 

 he is paid for. Yet how little the real 

 breeder needs! A few acres of land, a 

 skilled devoted man to help him, a little 

 greenhouse and a place in the middle of 

 his acres, where he can live and where he 

 can quietly watch and get ready for the 

 great occasion — the mating of two par- 



115 



