Luther Burbank, the Wizard of Santa Rosa

The man who changed what Americans eat lived in a modest cottage on Santa Rosa Avenue for more than fifty years, and when he died in nineteen twenty-six, the governor of California called it a loss to the nation. His funeral drew five thousand mourners. Newsreel cameras covered it as if he were a head of state.

Luther Burbank arrived in Santa Rosa in eighteen seventy-five from Lunenburg, Massachusetts, a twenty-six-year-old with a modest inheritance he had already spent on a small farm in New England. On that Massachusetts farm, he had developed what would become the Russet Burbank potato, selling the rights to a seed merchant for one hundred fifty dollars, enough to pay his passage west. He could not have known he was also selling the foundation of the American french fry industry. The Russet Burbank became, by the late twentieth century, the world's dominant variety in food processing, the potato of nearly every fast-food chain.

In Santa Rosa, Burbank established a nursery, a greenhouse, and an experimental farm in Sebastopol ten miles to the west, where he worked with plants the way a composer works with sound, selecting across thousands of specimens for a single desirable trait. Over fifty years, he introduced more than eight hundred varieties of plants, including fifty varieties of lilies, more than one hundred thirteen plums and prunes, ten berries, and the Shasta daisy, which had not existed before he created it. His freestone peach became a standard for the California canning industry.

Scientists of his day debated whether Burbank's methods were science or intuition. He was not a systematic experimenter in the modern sense. He could not explain, in molecular terms, why the crosses he made succeeded. He worked by observation and feel, by an almost sensory understanding of what a plant was trying to become. Charles Darwin had read his early work and praised it. Thomas Edison called him a genius. Henry Ford visited the Santa Rosa gardens.

Burbank died on April eleventh, nineteen twenty-six, and was buried under a cedar of Lebanon tree on the property where he had lived and worked. His grave is unmarked. The Luther Burbank Home and Gardens, at the corner of Santa Rosa Avenue and Sonoma Avenue, is now a National Historic Landmark, and the greenhouse he designed and built in eighteen eighty-nine still stands.