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 »