on the road: luther burbank’s farm

His­tory is a frag­ile thing, some­thing that I was reminded of on my recent visit to Sonoma County.

Burbank Shasta daisies

Pio­neer­ing plants­man Luther Bur­bank moved to this area in the mid-1880s, mak­ing his home in Santa Rosa, and estab­lish­ing a plant breed­ing and trial loca­tion nearby on Gold Ridge, in present-day Sebastapol. Over his career, which included over 40 years of work at this loca­tion, he devel­oped and intro­duced hun­dreds of vari­eties of food crops and orna­men­tal plants–including the still-popular Shasta daisy, and was pretty much the Thomas Edi­son of the plant world.

You can visit his main res­i­dence in Santa Rosa, but it was the Gold Ridge Exper­i­ment Farm where the work of com­ing up with the new vari­eties took place. Our host in Sebastapol basi­cally said that there wasn’t much to see of the farm any­more. But I was curi­ous to stand in the mid­dle of hor­ti­cul­tural and agri­cul­tural his­tory, so John and Jenny and I took a short trip to the site.

A small brown sign in down­town Sebastapol points to the farm, .7 miles away, and a sec­ond small brown sign down the road points left towards the loca­tion. The first thing that you see when you turn left, instead of some pas­toral trial farm scene over­flow­ing with his­tor­i­cal flow­ers, is the big­ger sign announc­ing the Bur­bank Heights & Orchards, an anony­mous clus­ter of gray clapboard-sided apart­ment houses. A bit of trail­blaz­ing over the wind­ing lane through the apart­ments even­tu­ally leads to a lit­tle yel­low cot­tage in a clear­ing, along with a match­ing out-building and a green­house that must be as small as the bath­rooms in the sur­round­ing apartments.

Burbank barn and apartments

If it weren’t for the green­house it’d be hard to know that this was the des­ti­na­tion. But this was it. What’s left of major botan­i­cal his­tory. (You can see the apart­ments in the background.)

Burbank cottage

The cot­tage dates to 1906, when the San Fran­cisco earth­quake scrapped the orig­i­nal struc­ture. There’s an adja­cent lit­tle cot­tage gar­den, with some exam­ples of Shasta daisies and other plants with ties to Bur­bank and this location.

Burbank nightshade

The hybrid pen­ste­mons here are mod­ern vari­eties, but there’s an inter­est­ing unknown tall night­shade with pur­ple flow­ers that was found grow­ing on the site in 1980. Aside from the Shasta daisies, the plants of major his­tor­i­cal inter­est here aren’t the hor­ti­cul­tural pret­ties as much as the trees and shrubs nearby: Wal­nuts, berries, plums, cher­ries, hawthorns, roses, among many.

Some of the plants aren’t Bur­bank hybrids at all, but are stock that was used in his veg­etable hus­bandry. Burbank’s work was all about improv­ing on nature, not appre­ci­at­ing nature as it exists, so what nature you see in the form of the orig­i­nal species–including the Catalina Cher­ries native to California–were col­lected here for their poten­tial value to what could be made with them.

In an arti­cle, “Luther Bur­bank : A Vic­tim of Hero Wor­ship,” Wal­ter L. Howard writes that “[t]he sci­ence of breed­ing grew and advanced rapidly dur­ing the first two decades of the new cen­tury, and though it may not be gen­er­ally rec­og­nized, the move­ment is trace­able to Bur­bank as a potent acti­va­tor. Pro­fes­sor H. J. Web­ber, a pio­neer plant-breeder and geneti­cist and a con­tem­po­rary of Bur­bank, has declared that through the influ­ence of Bur­bank the sci­ence of plant breed­ing was advanced by at least twenty years and for this accom­plish­ment alone, he deserved a siz­able mon­u­ment to his mem­ory.” (Quoted at the Gold Ridge website.)

Today, Luther Bur­bank isn’t com­pletely for­got­ten. There’s the lit­tle remain­ing farm­stead, and the Bur­bank home in Santa Rosa. Burbank’s Shasta daisy is the offi­cial flower of Sebastapol. And there’s even a stretch of High­way 12 between Santa Rosa and Sebastapol that’s des­ig­nated the Luther Bur­bank Memo­r­ial High­way. But Sonoma County, a region that’s liv­ing large as one of the hotspots of Cal­i­for­nia wine coun­try, seems a lit­tle dis­tracted by other things than to pay large amounts of atten­tion to a fig­ure whose career saw the rise but not the fall of Pro­hi­bi­tion in the United States.

So, should you plan a trip to God Ridge Exper­i­ment Farm? As a des­ti­na­tion unto itself, prob­a­bly not, unless you live nearby. But if you’re here for a visit to the Sonoma and Napa Val­ley winer­ies, sure, take the lit­tle side trip. It might be a lit­tle sad, but you’ll be glad you went.

August 14 2009 | Categories: gardening • places | Tags: • • • • | 4 Comments »

once an orchard

I wanted to find the quince tree again.

It prob­a­bly had been close to ten years since I last hiked my nearby Los Peñas­qui­tos Canyon Pre­serve. Still I clearly remem­bered com­ing upon an ancient but still fruit­ing quince in one of the trib­u­tary canyon bot­toms. Unwa­tered for decades and tended only by the wildlife, it had seemed like a mir­a­cle of sur­vival in San Diego’s desert climate.

Survivor quinceLast Sat­ur­day I scootered up to the pre­serve and started a slow stroll through the native wil­lows and sycamores and oaks that line the dry creek in López Canyon. I only vaguely remem­bered the loca­tion, but less than half a mile in, right by the side of the trail, there it was, still very much alive, green and loaded with fruit.

Fruit on old quince tree

Nearby, in the shade of an old sycamore and crowded with some robust shrubs–including poi­son oak–I found a sec­ond tree with fruit on its branches.

Quince and poison oak

And then I started look­ing around in earnest. Off to the left stood a dif­fer­ent kind of tree, either a dif­fer­ent quince or maybe even a pear. It had a thick, creased trunk and the plant was clearly old. But the tree still drooped a lit­tle from the weight of the fruit.

Quince or pear treeQuince or pear fruit

Old apricot in Lopez CanyonNot far ahead stood another spec­i­men. Though with­out fruit it was clearly another fruit­ing tree, prob­a­bly an apri­cot, judg­ing by its leaves, a month after the last of its offer­ings would have been ripe.

So that made for four trees that I could find with­out crawl­ing through more poi­son oak or fur­ther through the snakey grass. I’m cer­tain all the trees were many decades old, but exactly how old I couldn’t say for sure.

Local his­tory places an orchard oper­a­tor in this canyon as late as 1921, so some of the trees may date to then, though this area has been ranched and cul­ti­vated at least as early as the early 1800s, when this area was con­tained in the first of the Mex­i­can land grants in Alta Cal­i­for­nia, to as recently as 1962, when the land was acquired by the County.

Ruiz-Alvarado adobe, San DiegoNearby, under a pro­tec­tive shel­ter at the con­flu­ence of López Canyon and Los Peñas­qui­tos Canyon, stand the remains of the Ruiz-Alvarado Adobe, one of the old­est struc­tures in San Diego County.

Any­thing older than a hun­dred years around these parts is con­sid­ered a relic. If you were to believe the most wish­ful of the sources the adobe would date all the way back to 1815, though more reli­able sources place its con­struc­tion at 1857. This small adobe, along with a later, grander one to the east, became part of a thriv­ing con­cern ded­i­cated to ranching.

Ruiz-Alvarado adobe, San DiegoMaybe it’s wish­ful and over-romanticizing on my own part–or maybe not–to imag­ine that the set­tlers who lived in this adobe planted the fruit trees in López Canyon. But the trees are as much of the human his­tory of this area as are the few remain­ing adobe walls. Here we need all the his­tory that we’ve got.

July 25 2008 | Categories: places | Tags: • • • • • • • • | 2 Comments »