Under the guise of wanting to learn more about my hometown “food history,” I decided to investigate one of Santa Rosa’s most famous food innovators: Luther Burbank. As a foodie, I have an accelerated interest in understanding where our food comes from, the methods behind its production and the distance it has traveled before consumption.
Skimming through the local section at Copperfield books, I could not help but be intrigued by the newly released Luther Burbank Biography “The Garden of Invention” by Jane S. Smith. Glancing through the reviews I decide to commit to a purchase and delve into the history of a community legend I knew little of.
Plants as inventions? Burbank thought so and over a fifty year period he introduced more than 800 varieties, many still widely used today. As Burbank’s career began to take hold in California honors as “the most famous gardener on the planet” quickly followed placing Burbank into a snapshot in time when “finding new and economically useful plants” was still a national concern.
Burbank’s understanding for the beauty of nature was shaped at a young age through numerous friendships with pseudoscience natural philosophers and literary writers including: Alexander Von Humboldt, William Blake, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Mostly self taught, Luther’s life mentor appeared through the relatively obscure text of Charles Darwin’s, “The Variation Animals and Plants under Domestication”, which sparked his imagination and gave him great purpose to “Go West,” and develop his field work to find the answers to the problems that the book only suggested.
After experiencing a few difficult east coast winters, Burbank left his home state of Massachusetts, to pursue the golden climate of California, which would allow him to experiment and plant year-round. Riding off the success of his first invention the Burbank potato, which is still widely used today as the industry standard. Luther landed on a 4-acre plot in downtown Santa Rosa. Still relatively unknown, Burbank leased rights away for a very low price, which over the first few years required him to try and seek additional royalties to carry on his experimental gardens in Santa Rosa.
His first clients on the West Coast included Petaluma orchard owner Warren Dutton. Burbank’s work with Dutton demonstrated his gift of grafting a superior tasting and looking product with solid yield predictability. From here, Luther’s influence in the field of agricultural and horticulture continued to blossom. His annual catalogs were a well sought after and anticipated marketing piece that left Mr. Burbank with a steady stream of business and notoriety.
His advances in his field sparked attention from Stanford University were he would often guest lecture, helping to bring him eventual acceptance into the broader scientific community and ultimately a proud recipient of the Carnegie grant for many years. (much to the chargin of Carnegie)
Luther remained loyal to his gardens in Santa Rosa and Sebastopol throughout the years. His impact drew many prominent admirers including Thomas Edison and Henry Ford who would correspond and even visit him at his gardens in Santa Rosa. Both Edison and Ford felt a reconnection to their country roots, as both brilliant inventors struggled with the affects their new technology had in a more industrialized world. Luther’s friendship and insight remained of key importance to Edison and Ford throughout their lives.
Burbank was also immortalized in Diego Rivera’s 1931 mural, the Allegory of California, Burbank kneels beneath the fruit filled hand of a goddess of plenty, nurturing an unidentifiable plant while other industries extract all they can from the natural landscape. That same year, Frida Kahlo also painted a Portrait of Luther Burbank that is, like much of her work, both heroic and foreboding.
The most enduring memorial to Burbank, though, is not a statue or a painting. It is a shovel. More specifically, it is Burbank’s shovel, proudly standing upright in the cement dedication stone of The Henry Ford American Heritage museum in Dearborn, Michigan. This symbolic monument was resurrected fourteen years after Ford’s and Edison’s memorable visit to Santa Rosa and more than three years after Burbank’s death. Thomas Edison joined President Herbert Hoover, scientist and Nobel laureate Marie Curie, inventors Orville Wright and George Eastman, oil magnate turn philanthropist John D.Rockefeller to honor Ford’s collection of ordinary implements. Ford insisted Edison’s signature be included on cement block that was to house Luther Burbank’s shovel as a symbolic presence of Burbank’s and Edison’s inventive spirit.
