I am not a plant person. It isn’t by choice, really. I simply have no aptitude for raising things with leaves or greenness. I lack, horribly, in horticultural skills.
That being said, I have given it a try over the years and failed miserably.
Case in point. A few years after Mary and I were together, we bought a new home in Eaton. New to us. During the first summer there, I went about trimming the bushes in the beds around the house. We had a lot of bushy bushes. And to finish things off, I decided to clean up some of our flower beds. It looked quite nice when I was done, I thought.
When Mary got home, I showed her my handiwork. To which she responded (in a voice just short of Satan’s), “WHERE IS MY SHASTA DAISY?”
Of course, I didn’t know a Shasta Daisy from Daisy the Duck, Daisy the Cow, or Daisy Duke from the Dukes of Hazard.
It truly was my last “go” at caring for anything green other than a couple of frogs and turtles.
The reason I think about this story now is because it was on this date that a man named Luther Burbank passed away. Yes, he left this Earth on April 11, 1926. He died from gastrointestinal complications, which might be telling.
I’ll tell you about Luther. He was a horticulturist. And as such, he developed more than 800 strains and varieties of plants. I’ll tell you what else. One of these plants was the Shasta daisy. I finally found the fellow responsible for that dastardly Shasta daisy.
He came up with all sorts of plants, like the Burbank potato, later known as the Russet Burbank potato. That potato is now the most widely grown potato in North America. Its claim to fame? This spud is used for McDonald’s french fries.
Some other of his plants include the fire poppy, the “July Elberta” peach, the “Santa Rosa” plum, the “Flaming Gold” nectarine, the “Wickson” plum, the freestone peach, and the white blackberry.
Luther was born on March 7, 1849, in Lancaster, Massachusetts. A Pisces by the Zodiac. I wonder if Pisces have better green thumbs.
He grew up on the family farm, the thirteenth of fifteen children. As a boy, he took a special interest in his mother’s large garden. His father died when he was 18 years old, and he got an inheritance which he used to buy a 17-acre plot of land near Lunenburg, Massachusetts. It was there that he developed the Burbank potato. Luther sold the rights to the Burbank potato for $150 and used the money to travel to Santa Rosa, California, in 1875. For more land, more research.
The guy had quite a life in his research and development of plants. They say he was an extremely nice man to everyone he met. He was admired for his modesty, his generosity, and his kind spirit. He gave money to various charities and made a point to support local schools.
But like so many others I’ve run across from this era, he was a supporter of eugenics. He believed human beings should be selectively bred. It may have had something to do with all his selective breeding in the plant world.
Nonetheless, he’s the guy with the Shasta daisy.
And for that, I still hold a little bit of a grudge.
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“To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.”
— Audrey Hepburn
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“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds that you plant.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson
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“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”
— Greek proverb
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I drink Shasta sodas. And I like those. But not other Shastas.
