The Garden of Invention: Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants Hardcover - 2009

by Smith, Jane S

A wide-ranging and delightful narrative history of the celebrated plantbreeder Luther Burbank and the business of farm and garden in earlytwentieth-century America

A century ago, Luther Burbank was the mostfamous gardener on the planet. His name was inseparablefrom a cornucopia of new and improved plants fruits, nuts,vegetables, and flowers for both home gardens andcommercial farms and orchards. At a time when the science ofgenetics was in its infancy and agriculture was often a perilouscombination of guess work and luck, many people wanted apiece of the man they called the Wizard of Santa Rosa.

As the United States moved from a nation of farmsto a nation of city dwellers, the people behind the new productsthat transformed daily life were admired with a fervor that isnot accorded to their present-day counterparts. Everyone knewand marveled at Samuel Morse's telegraph, Alexander GrahamBell's telephone, and Thomas Edison's electric light. And likethese other great American inventors, Burbank was reveredas an example of the best tradition of American originality,ingenuity, and perseverance. Burbank had learned the secretof teaching nature to perform for man, breeding and crossbreedingordinary plants from farm and garden until they weretastier, hardier, and more productive than ever before.

The Garden of Invention is neither an encyclopedianor a biography. Rather, Jane S. Smith, a noted cultural historian,highlights significant moments in Burbank's life (itself afascinating story) and uses them to explore larger trends that heembodied and, in some cases, shaped. The Garden of Inventionrevisits the early years of bioengineering, when plant inventorswere popular heroes and the public clamored for new varietiesthat would extend seasons, increase yields, look beautiful, orsimply be wonderfully different from anything seen before.

The road from the nineteenth-century farm totwenty-first-century agribusiness is full of twists and turns, ofcourse, but a good part of it passed straight through LutherBurbank's garden. The Garden of Invention is a colorful andengrossing examination of the intersection of gardening,science, and business in the years between the Civil War andthe Great Depression.