OUR WORK AT LUTHER BURBANK'S GOLD RIDGE FARM

Some of you might have noticed that, for the last couple of days, I haven't been around Gather much... I have an excellent excuse for this: I've been doing a lot of work for the historical society where I serve on the Board of Directors as "Past Co-President".

The Western Sonoma County Historical Society has a lot of projects... The way I got involved with it was through doing volunteer work at one of the historic sites that it administrates: Luther Burbank's Gold Ridge Farm in Sebastopol CA.

Luther Burbank (or, as I like to call him "Ole Luke") was a plant breeder who lived from roughly the 1850s to the mid 1920s. They used to call him "The Plant Wizard" -- much as his good friend, Thomas Edison, was called "The Wizard of Meno Park". Burbank had some other famous buddies, too, whose names you might recognize: Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, Helen Keller, the Paramhansa Yogananda (author of "Autobiography of a Yogi") and Jack London -- among others.

Burbank was the inventor of the shasta daisy, the nectarine, the "plumcot" (a cross between an apricot and a plum -- now called "pluot"), spineless cactus, the russet (Burbank) potato and the "Santa Rosa" and "Satsuma" plums. He worked with plants his whole adult life here in Sonoma County and his home and gardens (a California State Landmark) is still located in Santa Rosa CA, which is the Northern California town where I grew up.

"Ole Luke" is pretty much Santa Rosa's only claim to fame... Well, besides Chuck "Sparky" Shultz (the creator of "Peanuts"), that is... But many people today have never heard of him. I read somewhere that -- in Burbank's time -- more people in the world recognized Burbank's name than the name of the President of the United States!

Burbank was kind of an odd, little fellow... His parents were intellectuals who paraded a constant stream of professors, writers, philosophers and scientists past young Luther as he was growing up in Massachusetts. One uncle was the head of a university anthropology department and a couple of others were "truck farmers" (what we would call "hobbyist farmers", today) who trucked the produce they grew to farmers markets each week to sell.

Burbank was about 8 or 9 when he read a book that would profoundly alter the course of his life: Charles Darwin's "Origin of the Species". Even at that young age, he hit upon the idea of using the principles of Darwin's theory of "survival of the fittest" to breed fruit & nut trees, vegetables, grains and flowers for increased yields and greater resistance against insects and diseases.

Burbank would later tell the story of being about 10 years old, sitting on a small hill in Massachusetts, watching a long line of freight cars make their way along the railroad tracks when he suddenly had a "vision" of each boxcar filled to bursting with fruits, nuts and vegetables -- the abundance of which would be engineered by scientific manipulation of Darwin's theories -- "with which to feed a hungry world".

The global scope of this altruistic thought is fairly commonplace today but, you must bear in mind that this happened in the late 1860s or so -- at least a hundred and fifty years before "We are the World" and foodbanks -- and it's a ten year-old boy we're talking about here!

At about age 19, Burbank sold the starter crop and rights of his invention, the "Burbank Potato", for $150 to a farmer in (you guessed it) Idaho who renamed it the "russet" and he used that money to come to Northern California to live out his dream of becoming a plant breeder. The russet potato is the largest selling potato in the world today and this is because of the huge volume of all those fast-food french-fries! No other potato has yet been discovered or invented that can match the russet's virtues in the french-fry department...

About 1885, Burbank bought the property known as "Gold Ridge Farm" in the town of Sebastopol (approximately 5 miles west of Santa Rosa) because he was running out of space to carry out his larger experiments in fruit and nut trees, berries and large perennials (such as crinum lillies and shasta daisies) at his home in town.

Burbank died in 1926 but, Burbank's second wife, Elizabeth Waters Burbank, (who was 30 years his junior) did not pass away until the mid-1970s and, so (without a drop of irrigation, weeding, pruning or the barest granule of fertilizer or pesticide) the hawthornes, persimmons, chestnuts, black and blue berries, quinces, trifoliate oranges, grapes, walnuts, cherries, plums, apples, pears and Jerusalem pears of 10-acre Gold Ridge Farm (whose Master had just gone off one day and never returned) -- sat for nearly half a century, unattended and forgotten, waiting to be rediscovered. . .

Upon her death, Elizabeth Burbank donated Gold Ridge for the building of low-cost senior and disabled housing but stipulated that the adjacent approximately 3 acres of the Farm that remained -- including the (by then) fallen ruins of the Caretaker's Cottage -- be set aside as a public-use open area and park dedicated to the memory of Luther Burbank. The Western Sonoma County Historical Society was founded at that time by local, grassroots volunteers in order to help assure that Mrs. Burbank's wishes were honored.

There are no paid staff positions in either the Western Sonoma County Historical Society or at Burbank's Farm. Brush was cleared, paths laid out and cut, the Cottage and a 3/4 sized replica of Burbank's original barn -- destroyed by fire in the late 1960s -- rebuilt by the donated labor of volunteers and the property continues to be maintained and improved exclusively by volunteers to this day.

For us, it is a "labor of love" and a testament to the "wizardry" of Burbank which seems to have the ability to inspire and motivate even those who were still a quarter-century away from being born when the Master left his living laboratory behind...

I hope that all of you put aside a few hours each week to help along some project that is dear to your heart, too. . . It's work that's good for the soul. . .