Luther burbank biography information about mark
•
In the late 1970s, a steadfast group of 12 local business and community leaders dreamed of creating a home for the arts in Sonoma County. They envisioned a place where people could treasure the talents of the Santa Rosa Symphony on their own home scen (at the time the Symphony was holding performances in a high school gymnasium) and enjoy performances they typically had to travel to San Francisco or further away to see.
“We really wanted an arts center for our community,” said Henry Trione, who was, for decades, one of the region’s leading philanthropists. “So, when the church building came up for sale and it so perfectly suited what we wanted, we decided to buy it.”
Such is how the Center’s founding families found themselves at a bankruptcy auction seeking to purchase the River Road complex then owned bygd the Christian Life Center. As the only cash bidders, the Center’s founding families walked away with the property for $4.5 million, reaching deep into th
•
If only we could send messages to the past: Skip the play, Mr. Lincoln; double-check your navigation, Amelia Earhart; Elvis, dump the pills; Luther Burbank, beware the men running operations in your name because they are about to destroy your reputation.
Burbank drifted through the years 1913-1915 unaware, for the most part, the people he trusted were undoing everything he had struggled to build for over thirty years. The root of the problem was the same weakness Burbank had shown before; he wasn’t paying attention because he just wanted to work with his plants (his similar tribulations with the Carnegie Institution and the years 1905-1910 are covered in the four part “BURBANK FOLLIES” series). “I have no time to make money,” he told the Press Democrat in 1912. “I’ve more important work to do.” Add in his complete lack of any executive management skills and it’s no great surprise that things went so wrong.
(RIGHT: Color photogr
•
Luther Burbank
Luther Burbank developed more than 800 strains and varieties of plants, including 113 varieties of plums and prunes, 10 varieties of berries, 50 varieties of lilies, and the Freestone peach. Born in Lancaster, Massachusetts, Burbank received only an elementary education.
At 21 he began a 55-year plant breeding career. In 1871 he developed the Burbank potato, which was introduced in Ireland to combat the blight epidemic. He sold the rights to the Burbank potato for $150, which he used to travel to Santa Rosa, California. In Santa Rosa, he established a nursery garden, greenhouse, and experimental farms that have become famous throughout the world. Burbank carried on his plant hybridization on a huge scale. At any one time he maintained as many as 3,000 experiments involving millions of plants. The Plant Patent Act of 1930 amended U.S. patent law to permit protection of new and distinct varieties of asexually reproduced plants, other than tuber-propagated plants.
T