Luther Burbank's Experimental Farm, Sebastapol, California

The Cottage with "Blushing Rose".  (Now Interior is meeting room, gift shop)

Workshop







 



Luther Burbank 1849-1926 

Burbank travelled by bike from Santa Rosa, and would sleep overnight here and work on his breeding of plants.  The workshop has been reconstructed, having been lost in fire, and he rebuilt the cottage, himself, the original having been destroyed by an earthquake.  The garden reflects trees from his period of time as well as an effort to show the plants he cultivated.... 

 

This area of interest stems in part from the study I did of Linnaeus in Sweden, and his correspondence with John Bartram, in Philadelphia.  On a NEH grant in Florida, I tracked the lost camellia  which WS Merwin memorializes in one of his poems.  I composed a lecture for the Swedish Heritage Society's Annual Lecture in Philadelphia and presented another for the Bartram Association celebration of Bartram.   The naming of species as well as the plant exchanges through time make the gardens of the world available to us, today, as does their introduction of new varietals and hybrids.  Burbank gave America its russet potato and Shasta daisy, along with other improved varietals.   His plant breeding attracted Frido Kahlo the artist who drew him as "a tree" which is how he liked to think of himself, and he is buried beneath the tree on his property in Santa Rosa.  Thoreau and Georgia O'Keefee both likened themselves to trees and implied that they wished people would be more like trees.   The Stieglitz family gardener, was the husband of Stieglitz's  horticulturalist daughter; he brought these experiments of Burbank to the attention of Georgia O'Keefe and the interest is reflected in her paintings.  The visit to the De Young exhibition prompted the visits to the Burbank sites, which proved rewarding.  Burbank  felt California exactly the right place for his enterprise, as he could garden year round.  

 

Janet Roberts, on site