Everybody likes quince jelly and marmalade, but it remained for Mr. Burbank to create the pineapple quince, which can be eaten out of hand like an apple. For his improved cherry fabulous sums have been paid in Eastern markets—over three dollars a pound in one case.
"Cauliflower is only cabbage with a college education," said Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson. What Luther Burbank is doing besides creating entirely new fruits and vegetables, is to give the older ones a college education. He has grown, to cite his own words, "several millions of new fruits ... in the constant effort to eliminate faults and substantiate virtues."
Burbank's Formosa plum blends at least fifteen different varieties in its origin. It is "unequaled in quality," free from all disease, and keeps remarkably well. Another of his new plums is practically without a pit, while a third has the flavor of a Bartlett pear. Into another he has bred "a delicious fragrance, so powerful that when left in a closed room over night the whole apartment will be delightfully saturated with the odor." The new Nixie plum has, when cooked, the flavor and appearance of cranberries. It is described as "the forerunner of a wholly new class of fruits," and as having an "almost incomparably delicious" flavor, which it owes to the blood of the wild Sierra plum.
Some of Mr. Burbank's prunes excel the best of the French; and his plumcot is another of the entirely new fruits he has given the world. In creating this, he bred together a wild American plum, a Japanese plum, and an apricot, making a fruit which differs in flavor, color and texture from any other kind. There are already several varieties of it.
Of his successful experiments in "educating" nuts three may be mentioned. He has made chestnut trees bear at the unheard-of early age of a year and a half; he has created a "paper shell" walnut; and, what is more remarkable still, he has removed from the walnut the disagreeably bitter inside skin which makes it indigestible because of the tannin in it.
Grapes have not been neglected. In the summer of 1911 I asked him if he would not undertake to educate some other grapes grown in California to the level of the Muscatels and at the same time give the Muscatel a thicker skin to make it better able to stand transportation to the East. He answered in a letter dated July 25, that he was "at work on several of the California grapes to give them better flavors, thicker skins, and better keeping qualities; and," he added, "I assure you that I am having good success. They are not yet ready to send out."
The Newtown Pippin is one of the finest apples, but he has a descendant of it which is a far better bearer and has "an added aromatic fragrance." There are improved peaches, too; also, many beautiful flowers new to the world; but of flowers this is not the place to write.
Is it not strange that this unselfish wonder-worker, whose object is not to make money (except for the purpose of enabling him to go on with his experiments), should have met with so much hostility? Yet he declares that the greatest inconvenience or injustice he has met is not misunderstanding, prejudice, envy, jealousy, or ingratitude, but the fact that purchasers are so often deceived by unscrupulous dealers who, misusing his name, foist upon the public hardy bananas, blue roses, seedless watermelons, and a thousand other things, including United States Government thorny cactus for the Burbank Thornless.
On this point Mr. Burbank has reason to write with a feeling of mingled pride and resentment. In 1896 the first scientific experiments for the improvement of cactus as food for man and beast were made on his farms. Eight years later, when these costly experiments were crowned with success, the Department of Agriculture spent $10,000 in searching for a thornless cactus like those already produced by Mr. Burbank. The result was a failure; the "spineless" cactus sent out were not spineless, not safe to handle or feed to stock, while the fruit was "seedy and poor."
