HORTICULTURIST

Background.

Luther Burbank was an American original: largelyself-taught, he was an inventor and tinkerer by temperament but worked in the organic, rather than the mechanical, world and had an immense influence on academic botany and genetics. Born in Lancaster, Massachusetts, Burbank's first job was with the Ames Plow Company in Worcester (1864-1867). Then he attended the Lancaster Academy for a year, during which he first read Charles Darwin's On The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (1868), a book that exercised a profound influence on his career. Burbank learned from Darwin the methods of artificial selection that breeders use to develop desirable characteristics in domestic plants and animals. On his family's farm in Lunenburg, Massachusetts, he developed the Burbank potato, an immensely popular and economically important variety, the antecedent of the Idaho potato. In 1875 he...