168 GARDENING WITH BRAINS * 



of exquisitely refined sensibility. One time he 

 had a row of daisies all of which seemed equally 

 white to his assistants and to a number of other 

 persons, though his eyes told him that one of 

 them was nearer a pure white than all the 

 rest. But one day an artist from San Francisco 

 visited his garden, and when she was shown 

 the daisies she e-xclaimed at once that there was 

 one much whiter than the rest, and pointed to 

 the one he felt was nearer to purity in white- 

 ness than any others of all the thousands of 

 daisies in his garden. 



That flower became one of the ancestors of 

 the famous Shasta daisy, now sold by all seeds- 

 men everywhere. Its other ancestors were an 

 English large-flowered daisy and a pure-white 

 Japanese variety. And thus by careful inter- 

 marriage Burbank transformed a common road- 

 side weed of New England into a thing of beauty 

 and a joy forever. 



He has done the same thing with other plants, 

 and, he says, "there is still an indefinite amount 

 of material among our wild plants from which 

 garden plants might be developed.'' "To name 

 all that are worthy of consideration would," he 

 adds on another page of Vol. X, "take many 

 volumes, for there are more than ten thousand 

 species of flowers indigenous to the United 

 States, and of these only something like fifteen 

 hundred have at one time or another been 

 placed under cultivation." He advises amateur 



