-8? 



BURBANK'S WORK 



199 



story; where geraniums and veronicas in the 

 front yard are not bushes, but trees. Little did 

 he dream, when he crossed the continent in 

 1875, that he was destined to out- California 

 California; that he would have gardens there 

 after seeing which the most distinguished botan- 

 ist and plant breeder of Europe, Prof. Hugo de 

 Vries of Amsterdam, would write that "the 

 flowers and fruits of California are less wonder- 

 ful than the flowers and fruits which Mr. Bur- 

 bank has made"; that "Luther Burbank is the 

 greatest breeder of plants the world has ever 

 known"; and that "the magnitude of his work 

 excels everything that was ever done before, 

 even by large firms in the course of generations." 

 While the California climate helped to bring 

 about such an astonishing result, Luther Bur- 

 bank's horticultural genius and his infinite 

 capacity for taking pains were the prime factors 

 in his success. He purchased a four-acre place 

 in Santa Rosa, about fifty miles north of San 

 Francisco. The land was "about as poor as 

 could be found"; it had been the bottom of a 

 pond. He drained it with tiles, and then, he 

 relates, "as manure was cheap near by, I had 

 eighteen hundred loads of it put on the four 

 acres." Thus this very poor land, which nobody 

 had wanted, was transformed into the earth's 

 chief garden spot; nowhere else in this wide 

 world could you find another four-acre patch on 

 which so many historic garden events have taken 



