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All this time Luther had followed a rather old practice. At least it seemed odd to his friends and it was very
annoying to his mother. In a field of corn daisies, peas, or raspberries, whenever he found one plant that
was extra large and healthy, he would mark it. When it went to seed, Luther would carefully keep that seed
away from the common stock and plant it in a separate place, What made the habit annoying to his mother
was that when Luther had no string in his pocket to tie around the plant, he would pull out his shirttail, tear
off a trip and tie that on his chosen stalk. This habit was the start of Luther's fame and fortune, for that is
how he marked the potato seed ball which yielded the Burbank potato.
After the Burbank potato was successful, Luther sold his farm. He was too eager to see what he could
do with new plants but had to wait a whole year for each crop. He had heard that in California he could
raise three crops in a year. So he bought a ticket to California, kissed his mother and sister goodbye, and
set out for the new land. He was twenty-six years old. In California, Luther looked about for a place to
settle down and go to work. He had just ten dollars, ten potatoes and the suit he was wearing when he
arrived in Santa Rosa Valley, eighty kilometers north of San Francisco. For some time the young man had
to work at odd jobs in order to eat. He did carpentry work, ran errands, and even cleaned chicken coops.
But he did not become discouraged. Finally, he found the kind of work that suited him best, helping in a
greenhouse. Though the pay was very small, he saved all he could economizing in every way, until he had
enough money to buy himself a small plot of ground in Santa Rosa. He started his own nursery business.
The first year he made a profit of only $15, but he was happy in his work. Then a bit of luck came his way.
A man named Dutton wanted twenty thousand prune trees within nine months, and no nursery in the vicinity
could supply them. Luther accepted the order. He then began to wonder how he would fulfill it. There must
be some way, and he could find it. At last he worked out a plan, based on his boyhood experiments in the
grafting and budding of trees. He bought twenty thousand fine almonds and planted them, as he had once
planted his corn. He knew that almond trees grow much faster than prune trees. When the almonds sprouted, he
transplanted them into a special plot of ground. By the end of June, he had a miniature forest of almond seedlings.
Then Luther bought twenty thousand prune buds from a farmer whose prune trees were strong
and healthy. He grafted these prune buds onto the almond seedlings. Then he partly broke off the
almond tree tops so they would not grow any more and all the sap would go to the prune buds. When Mr
Dutton came for his twenty thousand prune trees that fall, Luther was ready to deliver them. Dutton was
amazed. He said Luther was a wizard. This name stuck to him, though he did not particularly like it. But
to the general public 'wizard' seemed a good name for a man who, as the years went by, developed a
thornless cactus, a white blackberry, an apple tree that bore five or more different kinds of apples at one
time, a perfumed calla lily, and thousands of other strange and wonderful plants.
For a while Luther was happy at his work in the nursery. People from all over the world were sending
for his seeds and plants. He was becoming wealthy. But the nursery business took too much of his time.
He wanted to breed new plants, not just raise seeds. So he sold the nursery and bought four acres of land
where he started his real life's work. There was so much he wanted to do that he arose early and went to
bed late. Luther had help, of course, but no other person in the world could see with eyes or feel with his
fingers. Those eyes and fingers could tell from a seedling what the adult tree would be like and what kind
of fruit it would bear. No one else had this power, so he had to do most of the work himself.
Sometimes his work was actually painful, such as his experiments with the cactus. He started to wear
gloves, but they slowed him down so much that he stripped them off and worked barehanded among the
prickly plants. Sometimes his hands and arms and face would be torn and bleeding, his fingers burning
with the pain of the cactus spikes. But he never let such things slow him down. He was trying to produce
a thornless cactus, and he succeeded, although it took twenty years of hard work.
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