Burbank arrived in California in 1875, inspired by Charles Darwin's The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication. Back in Massachusetts, he had already developed the Burbank potato on a 17-acre plot near Lunenburg - a starchy, disease-resistant tuber he bred to help address the devastation of the Irish potato famine. He sold the rights for $150 and headed west. In Santa Rosa, he established his nursery, greenhouse, and experimental fields on a modest lot that would become his life's headquarters. The Greek Revival house he built in 1884 still stands in the park. He lived in it for twenty-two years before moving across Tupper Street to a larger home - one that no longer exists. But the greenhouse he designed and built in 1889 survives, a working relic of a time when a single man's curiosity could reshape American agriculture.

The numbers are staggering. Over his fifty-five-year career, Burbank developed more than 800 strains and varieties of plants - fruits, flowers, grains, grasses, vegetables, and cacti. The Shasta daisy, introduced in 1901, is still one of the most popular flowers in American cutting gardens. The Santa Rosa plum remains among the most widely cultivated plum varieties in the country. He created the plumcot, a hybrid of plum and apricot. He bred spineless cacti for livestock feed, white blackberries, and the freestone peach. At any given time, as many as 3,000 experiments ran simultaneously across his Santa Rosa nursery and his 18-acre experiment farm in nearby Sebastopol. His methods were intuitive rather than strictly scientific - he selected by eye and instinct rather than by genetic analysis, which barely existed in his era - but the results spoke for themselves. Four years after his death, Congress passed the Plant Patent Act of 1930, directly inspired by his work.

Today, Luther Burbank Home and Gardens is a city park, open daily without charge. The gardens contain many of Burbank's original horticultural introductions: collections of cactus, fruit trees, ornamental grasses, medicinal herbs, roses, and walnuts spread across the property, most labeled with both their botanic and common names. The 1889 greenhouse still stands, its glass panes catching the Sonoma County light. Visitors walk paths that Burbank himself walked, past specimens he planted and tended. The property carries a National Historic Landmark designation and is California Historical Landmark number 234 - one of only a handful of private gardens in the state to hold both distinctions. Guided tours are available for a fee, but the gardens themselves ask nothing of visitors except attention. The plants are the exhibit.

When Luther Burbank died on April 11, 1926, his second wife Elizabeth Waters Burbank was left with the house, the gardens, and a legacy that the entire city claimed as its own. California had already made March 7 - Burbank's birthday - the state's official Arbor Day. Elizabeth moved out of the Greek Revival house after his death, crossing Tupper Street to the newer home. But she eventually returned to the original house, where she lived until her own death in 1977 at the age of 89 - fifty-one years of quiet guardianship over her husband's garden and grave. It was Elizabeth who ensured the property passed into public hands. She donated the companion property, the Gold Ridge Experiment Farm in Sebastopol, to the city with stipulations that preserved Burbank's living specimens. At the Santa Rosa homestead, her decades of stewardship kept the gardens intact through the middle decades of the twentieth century, when so many historic properties were lost to development. The Cedar of Lebanon still shades Burbank's grave, and the garden still grows.