THE MAN AND HIS WORK 



sonias and gladioli, the wonderfully varied pop- 

 pies, including one that is blue in color, and the 

 extraordinary colony of lilies showing thousands 

 of new and strange combinations of form and 

 color. 



By way of adorning lawn and park, Mr. Bur- 

 bank has developed a substitute for grass in the 

 South American lippia which thrives in time of 

 drought, and requires not one-tenth the attention 

 given ordinary lawn grass. He has developed a 

 vast number of ornamental shrubs and vines, in- 

 cluding new types of clematis with beautiful and 

 varied flowers. And in experimenting with trees 

 he has produced walnuts that grow to gigantic 

 size in a few years, and, at the other end of the 

 scale, chestnuts that bear abundant crops when 

 they are mere bushes. 



A chestnut that bears large nuts at six months 

 from the seed creates as much astonishment as 

 almost any other single anomaly seen at the fa- 

 mous experiment gardens at Sebastopol. 



The chestnut that is developing a smooth burr 

 is also of peculiar interest; matching the walnut 

 that was made to bear so thin a shell that the 

 birds destroyed the nuts, so that it became neces- 

 sary to thicken the shell by further selective 

 breeding. 



These glimpses, together with bare mention of 

 the spineless cactus with its amazing crop of 

 luscious fruit, must suffice to suggest the varied 

 lines of plant experiment that Mr. Burbank car- 

 ries forward year by year. 



[17] v 



