LUTHER BURBANK 



It was solely and exclusively the quality of 

 winter-bearing that made the plant appeal to me 

 and suggested to me the possibility of developing 

 from it a valuable addition to our list of garden 

 vegetables. 



My original stock of half a dozen plants soon 

 increased to a hundred or more. These plants 

 produced seed abundantly in successive years, 

 and all this seed was carefully planted and the 

 seedlings that grew from it, to the number of 

 hundreds of thousands, were closely examined 

 and tested as to various desirable qualities. 



From among the thousands I was able to select 

 here and there a plant that showed exceptional 

 qualities of growth, standing well up above its 

 companions of the same age. Of course selection 

 was made of the plants showing this exceptional 

 virility, and in the course of a few years I had thus 

 developed, by persistent selection, a race of plants 

 that grew with extreme rapidity, and to a size, by 

 comparison, quite dwarfing that of the original 

 parent stock. 



These fast-growing descendants of the New 

 Zealand plant had not only the desirable qualities 

 of texture and flavor of leaf stalk already referred 

 to, but they retained and advanced upon the 

 tendency of their ancestors to grow constantly 

 throughout the year. This anomalous tendency, 



[176] 



