Page:How and Why Library 143.jpg

 acres of these poppies, as yellow as gold. Suddenly he saw one blossom that had red stripes on its petals. He tied a label on the stalk so he could find it again, and left it there for the seed to ripen. He gathered these seed and planted them in his garden near some red poppies. When the two blossomed he took the pollen from the red poppy on a camel's hair artist's brush and, as lightly as a butterfly, put it on the seed button of the striped blossom. The seed from that, the next year, grew into big, crimson flowers.

The name of this plant wizard is Mr. Luther Burbank. He has made big, snow-white, double-petaled Shasta daisies from the common field daisy. He has grown white blackberries, and stoneless plums, and thornless cactus that cattle can feed on in the desert, and many other plants. If you ask him how he does it he will say, modestly, that he finds a plant that wants to come up higher, and he helps it a little, just as a rich man or a church will sometimes send a very bright, ambitious boy to college.

Farmers help plants come up higher, and get better and different varieties of seeds all the time. They plant the largest seeds from the biggest, fullest ears of corn, and the best filled stalks of wheat. They take the smoothest, mealiest potatoes with the healthiest eyes. And they change the crops grown on a field. Wheat and cotton and certain other crops use up the plant food in the soil, if they are grown year after year in the same fields. So clover is planted to make nitrates for the soil. Flowers really do want us to look at them and smell them, just as they want the wind to blow on them, the bees and butterflies to visit them, and men and birds to eat their fruits. If we love them and find them useful to us, we help them grow and change.

The old, old call of "come up higher" is still sounded in the woods and fields. Older people can remember the first navel oranges without seeds, and the big Burbank potatoes. Every flower show has some new and more beautiful rose or chrysanthemum; every new spring seed catalogue its new colorings of sweet peas and nasturtiums. Any little boy or girl with a tiny garden, can watch for some flower with a poet's gift for size, color or perfume, and help it "come up higher."