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The Penguin Press
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The Garden of Invention
A wide-ranging and delightful narrative history of the celebrated plant breeder
Luther Burbank and the business of farm and garden in early twentieth century America

by Jane S. Smith
Copyright © 2009 Jane S. Smith
Published by The Penguin Press


 
A century ago, Luther Burbank was the most famous gardener on the planet. Burbank had learned the secrets of breeding and crossbreeding ordinary plants from farm and garden until they were tastier, hardier, and more productive than ever before. His name was inseparable from a cornucopia of new and improved plants—fruits, nuts, vegetables and flowers—for both home gardens and commercial farms and orchards.

As the United States moved from a nation of farms to a nation of city-dwellers, the people behind the new products that transformed daily life were admired with a surprising fervor not accorded to their present-day counterparts. Everyone knew and marveled at Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone and Thomas Edison’s electric light. And like these other great American inventors, Burbank was revered as an example of the best tradition of American originality, ingenuity, and perseverance.

The Garden of Invention is neither an encyclopedia nor a biography. Rather, Jane S. Smith, a noted cultural historian, highlights significant moments in Burbank’s fascinating life and uses them to explore larger trends that he embodied and, in some cases, shaped. The Garden of Invention revisits the early years of bioengineering, when plant inventors were popular heroes and the public clamored for new varieties that would extend seasons, increase yields, look beautiful, or simply be wonderfully different from anything seen before.

The road from the nineteenth-century farm to twenty-first-century agribusiness is full of twists and turns, of course, but a good part of it passed straight through Luther Burbank’s garden. The Garden of Invention is a colorful and engrossing examination of the intersection of gardening, science and business in the years between the Civil War and the Great Depression.

The Author

Jane S. Smith received her Ph.D. in English from Yale University and has taught at Northwestern University on topics ranging from twentieth-century fiction to the history of public health.
"
Her history of the first polio vaccine, Patenting the Sun: Polio and the Salk Vaccine, received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology.

She has served as commentator, consultant and writer for numerous documentary film projects.

 She lives in Chicago, where she works in a very small room with a very large window.

Excerpts from the Prologue >>>

The Garden of Invention is copyright © 2009 Jane S. Smith
Published by The Penguin Press
All rights reserved


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