202 GARDENING WITH BRAINS 



experiment is personally guided by his master 

 mind. "Such a knowledge of nature and such 

 ability to handle plant life would be possible 

 only to one possessing genius of a high order," 

 wrote Professor de Vries, after visiting Burbank. 

 He recognized at once wherein Burbank differed 

 from his predecessors and contemporaries. They 

 had all worked on a much smaller scale, a few 

 experiments at a time, while he supervised 

 thousands at a time and most of them on 

 a vast scale that no one had ever dreamed of 

 before. 



When you have one hundred thousand plants 

 of one kind to select from, the chance of finding 

 what you want is just one thousand times 

 greater than if you have only one hundred 

 plants. Burbank has sometimes had several 

 hundred thousand of one kind at a time lilies, 

 poppies, plum trees, and so on; and when he 

 had selected the individual plants that came 

 nearest his ideal he had the others pulled out 

 and made a bonfire of. In a single year he has 

 had as many as fourteen of these bonfires, some 

 of which consumed plants that, at nurseryman's 

 prices, were worth up to ten thousand dollars. 

 He had no time or room to bother with them. 



SAVING SPACE, TIME, AND MONEY 



One of his ingenious ways to save space, time, 

 and money is grafting a number of varieties on 

 a single tree. Grafting a few varieties of fruit 



