Burbank: Green In the Bank
As budding
plant breeders we checked out Luther Burbank in our Newne's
Pictorial Encyclopedia.
For image in pictures, or vision in words.
My brother Melvyn
got youthfully excited and read it out to me
-the same Newne's Encyclo which I lately found out calls prescient
William Blake's
prophetic poems on The spirit of the West: “the ravings of a madman.”
Newnes backed Burbank, but
we knew
of Luther Burbank before we ever read about him and
he CERTAINLY didn't seem a madman to us back then. For
all our commercial plants seemed to have his touch
bramble
berries were varieties bred by him.
Everbearers!
Boysenberries, Youngberries, Loganberries,
Thornless Youngberries, Lawtonberries;
let alone nectarines, Shasta daisies
or Burbank potatoes. He was the
Mr Plant of the Universe,
Creative Botany, The Genetic Genius, and
Biological Einstein.
A Monbulk-Silvan
hero.
We knew Santa Rosa
plums and Shasta strawberries,
climax of America.
America!
It was also lately when I found
John Dos Passos’
poem biography of Burbank
-in section called "The 42 Parallel"
in his novel "U.S.A."
where he calls him
[I quote verbatim]
The Plant Wizard.
Luther Burbank was born in a brick farmhouse in Lancaster, Massachusetts,
he walked around the woods one winter
crunching through the shinycrusted snow
stumbled into a little dell where a warm spring
was
and found the grass green and weeds sprouting
and skunk cabbage pushing up a potent thumb,
He went home and sat by the stove and read
Darwin
Struggle for Existence Origin of Species Natural
Selection that wasn't what they taught in church,
so Luther Burbank ceased to believe moved to
Lunenburg,
found a seedball in a potato plant
sowed the seed and cashed in on Mr Darwin's
Natural
Selection
on Spencer and Huxley
with the Burbank Potato.
Young man go west;
Luther Burbank went to Santa Rosa
full of his dream of green grass in winter ever-
blooming flowers ever-
bearing berries; Luther Burbank
could cash in on Natural Selection Luther Bur
bank
Carried his apocalyptic dream of green grass in
winter
and seedless berries and stoneless plums and
thornless roses brambles cactus---
winters were bleak in that bleak
brick farmhouse in bleak Massachusetts---
out in sunny Santa Rosa;
and he was a sunny old man
where roses bloomed all year
everblooming everbearing
hybrids.
America was hybrid
America should cash in on Natural Selection.
He was an infidel he believed in Darwin and
Natural
Selection and the influence of the mighty dead
and a good firm shipper's fruit
suitable for canning.
He was one of the grand old men until the
churches
and the congregations
got wind that he was an infidel and believed
in Darwin.
Luther Burbank had never a thought of evil,
selecting improved hybrids for America
those sunny years in Santa Rosa.
But he brushed down a wasp's nest that time;
he wouldn't give up Darwin and Natural Selection
and they stung him and he died
puzzled.
They buried him under cedartree.
His favourite photograph
was of a little tot
standing beside a bed of hybrid
everblooming double Shasta daisies
with never a thought of evil
And Mount Shasta
in the background, used to be a volcano
but they don't have volcanos
any more.
They devalued our pound Sterling, and then decimal-minimised us,
and repainted us
global. So we
imported cheap, "Green Revolution" berries
from Turkey, Egypt, Mexico,
anywhere where labour is cheap
and the people green,
till our hybrid was
the uneconomic old hybrid
and community atomised.
And then, I realised,
the evil as an evil of our past
(the rotted-basalt krasnozem soils)
a few eons ago, Silvan
was a part of a
volcano too.
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