The Plant That Did Not Exist

The Shasta daisy did not exist in nature. Luther Burbank made it.

He spent years crossing the common white field daisy of the United States with the larger English field daisy, then crossing those hybrids with a daisy species from Portugal, and then crossing that generation again with a Japanese species brought in from Yokohama. The final result, which he released to the public in nineteen oh one and named the Shasta daisy for the white-capped mountain visible from his experimental farm, had larger blooms, stronger stems, and longer flowering seasons than any of its parents. It was not a discovery. It was a construction, assembled genus by genus across a decade of patient crossing work.

Burbank did this hundreds of times with hundreds of species. He coaxed stoneless plums from thorny rootstock. He developed a cactus without spines by selecting among thousands of individual plants for the single specimens that showed the least defensive growth, then crossing those, then crossing again. He introduced spineless cactus as a forage crop for arid regions and spent several years corresponding with ranchers and agricultural departments around the world about its possibilities.

The debate about whether this was science or art ran through his lifetime and outlasted it. He himself said he could feel what a plant wanted to become. That was not a claim most botanists knew how to evaluate. He was not a precise experimenter by the standards of the emerging field of genetics. He did not always know why his crosses succeeded. He knew that they did.

What is not in dispute is the record. More than eight hundred new varieties introduced. He is buried in his own garden, under a tree he planted himself, on Santa Rosa Avenue, in the city he arrived in with one hundred fifty dollars and a potato.