BURBANK'S GARDENS 



guarding entrance to them before skipping blithely 

 to Santa Rosa "to see Burbank and his gardens." 



They are not formal gardens, not landscape 

 gardens. Just gardens to work in, laid out for con- 

 venience and efficiency of work, changing their as- 

 pect from week to week as this or that experiment 

 is begun, is fully under way, or is completed. The 

 few saved seedlings or grafts or fully grown plants 

 or trees, the "new creations," make no very great 

 show. The huge bonfires of the rejected make a 

 bigger sight. Burbank's catalogue for 1894 repro- 

 duces a photograph of a "sample pile of brush, 

 ready to burn, 12 ft. wide, 14 ft. high, and 22 ft. 

 long, containing 65,000 two- and three-year-old 

 seedling berry bushes (40,000 blackberry-raspberry 

 hybrids and '25,000 Shaffer-Gregg hybrids), all dug 

 up with their crop of ripening berries. Of the 40,- 

 000 blackberry and raspberry hybrids of this kind 

 'Phenomenal' is the only one now in existence. 

 From the other 25,000 hybrids, two dozen bushes 

 were reserved for further trial." 



But as little showy as these gardens are, com- 

 pared with others, the more intensely fascinating 

 are their contents. Here a strongly growing plum 

 tree bearing 600 varying seedling grafts! There 

 a small close patch of Shirley poppies, each flower 

 showing more or less blue in its color tone. They are 

 the results of an earlier growing of 200,000 seedlings 

 of the common crimson field poppy of Europe. Among 

 them Burbank found one showing faintest trace of 

 sky blue and these are the descendants, after sev- 

 eral generations, each one re-selected for blue, of 

 this solitary ancestral variant. Here is a great 

 walnut tree, child of the crossing of a black walnut 

 and a California walnut, and growing at the rate 

 of twice that of the combined growth of both par- 

 ents. Here is a calla lily with a fragrance sug- 

 gesting that of violets or water lilies. It is an 

 established "creation" now, but traces its pedigree 

 back but a few years to the common odorless Little 

 Gem Calla. A curiosity, although not a stable crea- 

 tion yet and perhaps never to become one, is the 

 odd fruit called plum-cot, produced on trees that 

 have a plum on one side and an apricot on the 

 other for parents. Burbank's work with plums has 

 been especially extensive even more extensive than 

 his twenty-five years constant experimenting with 

 berries and he has produced a long list of new 

 varieties, among them most of the standard shipping 

 varieties now grown in California. Much of his 

 results have come from a few grains of pollen from 

 the Chinese Simoni plum, a plum that produces al- 



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