204 GARDENING WITH BRAINS '^ 



drought-resisting Siberian alfalfa, and other 

 useful products of foreign lands; but no one 

 individual has ever imported foreign seeds of 

 the aforementioned great value so largely as 

 Burbank or so persistently and with such instinc- 

 tive knowledge. Nor has anyone ever hybrid- 

 ized, or intermarried, so many wild plants with 

 cultivated ones of many countries, thus giving 

 the new varieties the greater health and richer 

 flavor of the wild ones, combined with the 

 greater size, finer texture, and superior sweetness 

 of the cultivated kinds. Burbank's twelve 

 volumes — a most fascinating autobiography — 

 are replete with details on this subject. 



BONFIRES AND MORAL CHARACTER 



Regarding Burbank's bonfires I want to say 

 a few more words. I remarked that he had no 

 room or time to bother about the rejected plants. 

 But why didn't he sell them? Many of them 

 had points of superiority to the average stock and 

 would have been eagerly bought by nurserymen. 

 Take the case of fifteen hundred gladiolus 

 bulbs which he deliberately destroyed, though 

 they had an easy market value of a dollar 

 apiece. Let the great plant educator answer in 

 his own words: "It is better to run the risk of 

 losing a perfected product, through the destruc- 

 tion of the elements which went into it, than to 

 issue forth to the world a lot of second bests 

 which have within them the power of self-per- 



