Luther and the Potatoes

​“Burbank was a plant mystic who created new plants with little more than his imagination, his pollinating abilities, and his skill for selection.” —Jules Janick

​Luther Burbank was born in 1849 in Lancaster, Massachusetts, to Samuel Burbank and his third wife, Olive Burpee Ross. The thirteenth of his father’s fifteen children, Luther was drawn to plants and flowers from an early age. A flower could give him greater pleasure than any other kind of toy, according to biographer Henry Smith Williams.

  Burbank’s success as a horticulturist and plant breeder is legendary, and yet many did not, and do not, consider him a scientist. He didn’t keep careful records of methods and data or perform experiments in the classical sense—but he had an uncanny eye and feel for plants. His methods involved using broad diversity, repeated hybridization, and rigorous selection based on his own intuition. 

The Russet Burbank potato. Photo by Steve Caruso, Wikipedia CC BY-SA 2.5.

     George Harrison Shull, a biologist who worked with corn, reviewed Burbank’s work in the early 1900s and determined that Burbank’s processes were “more art than science.”

​      Luther Burbank’s role in the creation and development of the Russet Burbank potato was his first great success. In his early 20s, he read Charles Darwin’s book The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication and was impressed by the ideas. He also purchased a 17-acre farm where he planned to grow vegetables and also to “accelerate evolutionary changes,” according to biographer Jules Janick. 

       ​In 1872, a year after purchasing the farm, Burbank noticed a seedpod on an “Early Rose” potato plant. Potatoes generally are not propagated with seeds produced from flowers. The part we eat is an underground stem called a tuber. “Seed potatoes” are potato tubers cut up in such a way that each piece has one or two “eyes,” which are the part of the tuber that can grow into a new plant. 

A fruit on a potato plant (Solanum tuberosum). Photo by HZell, 2009. Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0.

     Cultivated potatoes depend more on their tubers than on flowers and fruit for reproduction, and the appearance of an actual seedpod is relatively rare.
​​     Inside this single seedpod were twenty-three seeds. Burbank planted all twenty-three to see what would come of them. One plant produced large, excellent tubers that tasted good and could be stored for a long time. This was the “Burbank” potato.

      Luther sold the rights to his potato in 1874 for $150 (about $3,700 today) with the stipulation that his name be kept. A subsequent natural mutation in this stock became the Russet Burbank, the most widely used potato in North America today. As we know, it’s excellent for baking and for french fries. 
​     Burbank used this money plus funds from the sale of his farm to move to California in 1875. Here his horticulture business took off after some years, during which he also worked as a carpenter. His many plant creations during his lifetime include the Shasta daisy, the Burbank cherry, the Santa Rosa artichoke, Elephant garlic, and the Burbank July Elberta peach.

Luther Burbank in 1915, around age 66. Public Domain.

​     Burbank had a connection with plants that went beyond intellectual curiosity. He did have a method for producing his hybrids, but I think that the plants responded to his positive attention and connection as well. I’m not saying that plants have emotions or animal-like consciousness; I am no fan of anthropomorphizing. Plants do not have brains or nervous systems in the animal sense. Plants do respond to stimuli from their environment, however, and part of those stimuli may come from organisms around them, including humans. Just because we have no explanation at this moment doesn’t mean the idea is impossible. In any case, Burbank loved plants, and he certainly reaped rewards from his wizard-like work with them.

For further exploration
      Michael Pollan has written a fairly well-balanced article about the topic of plant “intelligence”—it appeared in the December 23 & 30, 2013, issue of The New Yorker. You can read it here.
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​Jules Janick, “Luther Burbank: Plant Breeding Artist, Horticulturist, and Legend.” HortScience Vol. 50(2), February 2015. American Society for Horticultural Science. You can read and download a PDF here.

​Henry Smith Williams, Luther Burbank, His Life and Work. New York: Hearst’s International Library Co. (1915). Available in ebook/Kindle form from HardPress, Miami, FL (2017).