Artificial Pollination

It may have occurred to the reader that there is something like wizardry in the rapidity with which Mr. Burbank brings his new kinds of plants to maturity.

Continuing Luther Burbank’s Accomplishments,
with a selection from an article in Cosmopolitan Magazine by Garrett P. Servtss. This selection is presented in 4.5 easy 5 minute installments. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in Luther Burbank’s Accomplishments.

Place: Santa Rosa, California

Scores of similar crossings have been made, hundreds of thousands, and even millions, of plants have been produced, examined, judged — and out of all these multitudes a few individuals have been found worthy of preservation and cultivation, while the others have been brought into existence only to be destroyed again. Some of these rejected forms, springing from who knows what ancestral traits, have been put to death on sight, for they were vegetable monsters which ought not to live! Yet side by side with strange and undesirable forms come forth occasionally shapes of astonishing beauty and plants endowed with matchless virility and fruitfulness. One of Mr. Burbank’s hybrid chestnuts, selected from thousands of varying forms produced by the crossings, bears nuts almost two inches in diameter, when it is but eighteen months old! And excellent nuts they are, bowing with their weight the slender branches of miniature trees only three feet tall.

But, while the process of crossing is freely employed in order to obtain a great variety of new forms to work upon, and to obtain them quickly and rapidly, yet marvels are accomplished by simply following up the hints which Nature gives in her spontaneous though evanescent variations. The suppressed, unfavored life-forces are like a myriad of dim, eager faces, hidden behind nature’s draperies — starved, neglected children for whom there is no room and no hope, whose mother amid a multitude of pressing duties has no time, no thought, and no place for them. Yet, occasionally, one peeps forth with momentary boldness only to be rudely thrust back from the unfriendly and impenetrable throng of extant existences. Such an incident forms one of the opportunities for which the experimenter watches, ready to extend a helping hand.

Mr. Burbank’s latest production in the way of a new fruit, the “pomato,” is an example of the method of selection with out previous crossing. The pomato gets its name from the fact that it is a fruit resembling a tomato growing on a potato plant. The plant from which it has been developed was originally a wild variety of potato found in the Southwest, which showed a tendency to produce “balls” on the vines at the expense of the root-tubers. Mr. Burbank saw that these potato-balls, rudimentary examples of which are common on potato-plants, could be developed into a desirable fruit resembling the tomato. By the simple process of selection, as in the case of the crimson poppy, he succeeded, in the course of about five years, in training the plants to grow to several times the size of ordinary potato-plants, and to produce, in stead of the original small, hard, bitter, green balls, a fine white fruit, from an inch and a quarter to an inch and a half in diameter, with a tender skin like that of a tomato, although the fruit is more regular in shape than the tomato, and with a savory pulp having a high flavor and a pleasing fragrance. The pomato is delicious when eaten raw from the hand, and particularly fine as a preserve, or when cooked for the table. No doubt can be entertained that this new garden-fruit will be extensively introduced and cultivated.

One more example of the wonderful effects of selection when guided by the hand of genius. The example I have in mind is the “Bartlett plum,” surely one of the most astonishing fruits in existence, and a very striking instance of the force of education. It happened, years ago, that Mr. Burbank noticed in a plum taken from one of his trees a slight suggestion of the flavor of the well-known Bartlett pear. Mr. Burbank treasured the pit of that peculiar plum as if it had been a diamond, and, pursuing a method similar to that described in the case of the pomato, he gradually developed a new kind of plum, which has now attained a state of complete stability, a plum which, it is soberly averred, has more distinctly the flavor of the Bartlett pear than the pear itself has! And what shall we say of the fact that the plum-tree which bears the “Bartlett plums” presents some of the characteristics of a Bartlett pear-tree, although nowhere in its known ancestry has it been crossed with a member of the pear tribe? What a glimpse this opens into the infinite complexity of the history of plants, and what a light it casts upon Mr. Burbank’s dictum that “Heredity is the sum of all past environments!”

It may have occurred to the reader that there is something like wizardry in the rapidity with which Mr. Burbank brings his new kinds of plants to maturity, considering that the methods employed require the accumulated effects of successive generations. This is largely explained by the resort to grafting. Seedlings of a new variety of plant or tree are often grafted upon an old plant or tree, and thus are pushed ahead, and hurried onward, in the race of life. They get the benefit of the strength and virility of the older plant from whose fully developed circulation they draw their nourishment. Among the curious sights in Mr. Burbank’s grounds at Santa Rosa and at Sebastopol are trees hundreds of whose branches are “strangers to the blood” of the tree that bears them. One has no fewer than five hundred and twenty-six varieties of apples growing upon its grafted branches — red apples, green apples, yellow apples, round apples, bell-shaped apples, sweet apples, sour apples — and the seed of each of these can be separately experimented with.

“Artificial pollination” is another method employed by Mr. Burbank. With a camel’s-hair brush he takes the pollen from the stamens, or anthers, of the one flower, which in this case plays the part of the male parent of the cross, or hybrid, that is to be produced, and places it upon the stigmas covering the pistil of a different flower, which is to be the mother plant. This act is called “pollinating the flower.” When the pollination, or fertilization, is completed, the flower that has been thus treated is carefully protected (say, by covering it with a paper bag as it grows on its stem) from any further accidental contact with pollen carried by insects, or by the wind.

Garrett P. Servtss begins here. David Starr Jordan begins here.

More information here and here, and below.

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