David Burpee was a developer of seeds from the United States. He is noted for being the head of the Burpee Company for over fifty-five years.
Background
David Burpee was born on April 5, 1893 in Philadelphia, one of three children of Washington Atlee Burpee, a seed merchant, and Blanche Simons. His father had built a successful mail-order business, W. Atlee Burpee and Company, from a small seed shop opened in Philadelphia in 1876.
In 1888, W. Atlee Burpee bought the 500-acre Fordhook Farm near Doylestown in Bucks County, making it the family residence and the experimental growing center for the seed company. Burpee went to Europe annually and brought back seeds from Germany, Italy, France, Belgium, Hungary, and the Netherlands, in order to develop seeds for immigrants who wanted vegetables from the old country.
Education
Burpee, who said that he had a "very poor formal education, " attended Culver Military Academy in Indiana and Cornell University, but he dropped out after his first term when his father became seriously ill.
Career
At the age of eight, David Burpee began accompanying his father to Europe to look for new seeds. At the age of ten, David picked sage seeds on his father's farm for five cents per hour. He also worked as a roguer, picking out imperfect plants. David Burpee loved gardening but also viewed it as a challenge. When he was fourteen years old, his father offered him $1, 000 if he could develop a yellow sweet pea.
David went to Washington, D. C. , and obtained numerous species of the flower from the Bureau of Seed and Plant Introduction. He grew more than forty varieties of sweet peas on the family farm but failed in his effort to develop a yellow sweet pea. W. Atlee Burpee died in 1915 and the twenty-two-year-old David succeeded him as chief executive officer of what had become the world's largest mail-order seed business.
His brother W. Atlee Burpee, Jr. , became vice-president and treasurer of the firm. A crisis struck shortly afterward that threatened the future of the Burpee company. After months of testing, Burpee concluded in the summer of 1919 that the marigold should be developed as the flower of the future.
He spent decades developing the marigold and got rid of its turpentine smell when a missionary sent him an ounce of Tibetan marigold seeds that had no odor. Though the plants had no smell, the Tibetan marigolds had puny blossoms and only one good bloom, which was a mutation. Burpee and his employees sniffed more than half a million growing marigolds looking for other mutations. An employee found an entire row of odorless plants. Through hybridization, Burpee created some of the more colorful marigolds in the world.
From 1920 until 1954, Burpee sought to develop a white marigold that would grow two and a half inches or more across. In 1954, he offered a $10, 000 prize to the first gardener who could develop a pure white marigold, a challenge that met with success: he presented a check to Alice Vonk of Sully, Iowa, in 1976.
Burpee launched a campaign in 1959 to make the marigold the national flower and gained the support of Senator Everett M. Dirksen of Illinois. Calling the marigold "the flower of all the people, " Burpee registered as a lobbyist and brought truckloads of marigolds to Capitol Hill, giving bouquets and packets of seeds to legislators. Though Burpee won supporters, he failed to build a political consensus for the marigold. Tall and angular with a folksy demeanor, David Burpee was a Norman Rockwell character sprung to life. Working in his gardens, he wore three-piece suits. He had prominent, expressive, bushy eyebrows and wore wire-framed glasses.
Among the flowers developed with the drug were giant marigolds and snapdragons. A common wildflower, the black-eyed Susan, was transformed into spectacular Gloriosa daisies with the help of colchicine. Burpee said that his customers wanted "what is easy to grow and spectacular to look at. " Burpee was a tireless promoter.
He hosted annual press luncheons at Fordhook Farm, where garden writers could preview his new flowers and vegetables. Before mailing out his catalogs, Burpee would invite garden club members, horticulturists, and the news media to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City for an exhibition of his new seed offerings.
He named a new flower every year for a prominent American such as Mrs. Douglas MacArthur, Senator Everett Dirksen, Mrs. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Pearl Buck, Kate Smith, and Helen Hayes. His customers included the Duke of Windsor, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, and General George C. Marshall. Burpee corresponded regularly with mail-order customers and guaranteed refunds if they were less than satisfied with their flowers or vegetables.
In 1970, Burpee sold his business to the General Foods Corporation, remaining as a consultant. In 1979, the Burpee Company was purchased by the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation. Burpee died at Doylestown (Pennsylvania) Hospital in 1980.
Six years later, the Burpee Company was sold by ITT to the Recreation Company, a New York investment group. It was acquired in 1991 by George J. Ball, Inc. , a Chicago-based seed company.
Achievements
During his fifty-five years as the head of the Burpee Company, he wrote a "dear fellow gardeners" letter to millions of customers. About 4 million catalogs were mailed to gardeners every winter. About 21 million packages of seeds were sold annually from mail-order centers in Warminster, Pennsylvania, Clinton, Iowa, and Riverside, California. Millions more were sold through stores on Burpee racks. Bulk-seed vegetable sales were made to farmers and commercial growers and bulk flower sales were made to nurseries and florists.
Among the Burpee hybrids that followed years of crossing were these innovations: Burpee's red and gold hybrid marigold, which in 1939 became the first hybrid flower to be sold commercially; Supreme and Topper hybrid snapdragons; Zenith hybrid zinnias; and Burpee hybrid cucumbers, tomatoes, and cantaloupes. Burpee's geneticists used X rays to alter the genes of seeds and also made extensive use of the drug colchicine, which doubles the chromosome number in plants and changes its characteristics. Colchicine produces stronger stems, darker foliage, and richer colors.
Views
Like his father, David Burpee was an innovator. W. Atlee Burpee had introduced iceberg lettuce in 1894, bush lima beans in 1907, and had also developed Golden Bantam sweet corn and Golden self-blanching celery. David Burpee's own first major success was in 1934 when he developed an all-color double nasturtium.
Until the late 1930's, Burpee used selection to improve plant varieties. But he became a pioneer in hybridizing, crossing two strains of the same or different species to create a new flower or vegetable. Burpee demonstrated that hybrids are stronger growing, more disease resistant, and more attractive than their parents.
Quotations:
"Fortunately, I had a great deal of experience in the horticultural end of the business, " David Burpee recalled in 1976. "But then business management was entirely new to me. "
"The sweet pea had been the most popular flower grown from seed for many years. Then just about the time of my father's death, the sweet pea developed a fungus root rot. That disease gradually spread all over the United States where summers were hot. So the demand for sweet peas fell off increasingly year after year. "
"It had plenty of faults, " Burpee later recalled, noting that the flower was "late blooming, scrawny, [had] limited color range, and it had an odor in the foliage that some people didn't like. But underneath I saw a garden Cinderella. "
David Burpee took positive joy in his work. He often said: "If you want to be happy for an hour, get drunk. If you want to be happy for a weekend, get married. If you want to be happy for a whole week, kill your pig and eat it. But if you want to be happy all your life, become a gardener. "
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Burpee's place in the history of American gardening was summed up in 1976 by Ruth Snyder, who was then editor of Flower and Garden magazine: "David Burpee is a direct link with the history of American gardening. He's been there almost from the beginning. Although some universities have turned out giants of horticulture, their work doesn't always boil down to the people. Burpee brought his innovations to the people and made it all available for a quarter a packet. "
Connections
Burpee met his wife, Lois Torrance, a horticulturist, in 1936 at a flower show in Baltimore. They were married on July 18, 1938, and had two children. Their son Jonathan later headed Burpee's customer service department. The Burpee family lived in a 300-year-old farmhouse on Fordhook Farm.
