Business: DAVID BURPEE

The Gardener’s Gardener

IF you want to be happy for an hour, get drunk. If you want to be happy for a weekend. get married. But if you want to be happy all your life, become a gardener.”

So goes an old proverb often quoted by David Burpee, 67, president and proprietor of the W. Atlee Burpee Co., the world’s largest mail-order seed house. To spread the joys of gardening, Burpee each year mails out 4,000,000 copies of his catalogues, which bloom with richly flowered prose, amaze with promises of something “never before seen in asters,” and unfold the mysteries of celtuce (a celery-lettuce combination) and midget watermelon.

For the nation’s 40 million home gardeners, Burpee this year has five new flowers: Pink Peony asters, Gloriosa golden daisies, Glamour Shades snapdragons. Miracle marigolds and Trail Blazer zinnias. “Today’s gardener,” says Burpee, “wants what is easy to grow and spectacular to look at. We are working for bigger flowers on dwarfer plants. Americans want them big, but now, because of ranch-type houses, they want flowers low to the ground.”

Burpee’s 910,000 mail-order home garden customers bought nearly 7,000,-000 packets of seeds last year, ranging from Surecrop stringless wax beans (20¢) to the Mrs. Dwight D. Eisenhower hand-pollinated double petunias ($2 for a packet of 100 seeds), the most expensive seeds Burpee sells.

Like the auto and appliance busi nesses, the seed business is built on planned obsolescence. Burpee, who has developed hundreds of new varieties of flowers, often names outstanding new ones after celebrities. This calls for some careful catalogue descriptions. He likes to tell of the seedsman who named a flower after his mother, described it as “pure white, big and robust, with a wide, expanded form on stout stems.”

Experiments are performed on Burpee’s 500-acre Fordhook Farms, which surround the 250-year-old family home in Doylestown, Pa., where he lives with his wife and two children, or on the Floradale Farms in Santa Barbara County, Calif. His first venture into flower breeding was unsuccessful. His father, W. Atlee Burpee, the company founder, offered him $1,000 to develop a yellow sweet pea. He has yet to do so.

His first big success, he says, came in 1934 when he developed all-color double nasturtiums a year ahead of the competition. Sweet peas used to be the root of the Burpee flower business. When their sale fell off in the ‘305, Burpee decided that the public wanted marigolds. There was one big problem: they all smelled bad. One day he received a letter from a missionary offering him for $25 an ounce Tibetan marigold seeds that did not smell. Burpee accepted, found the plants had no smell, but unfortunately had runty blossoms, only one good bloom. Realizing that the good bloom was a mutation, he put his employees to work at the Floradale Farms sniffing at 554,000 growing marigold plants, looking for other mutations. One student found a whole row of odorless plants. Burpee has continued to develop his favorite flower, which this year passed zinnias as the company’s biggest flower seller. He is offering a $10,000 prize for the first gardener who can develop a pure white marigold, hopes to breed purple, red or blue marigolds.

TO produce other new flower strains, Burpee technicians have used X rays to alter the genes of calendula seeds, created a large double-petaled variety. They have treated seeds with colchicine. a chromosome-multiplying alkaloid that increases a plant’s size and changes its characteristics. Colchicine has made possible giant marigolds and snapdragons, and fluffy, ruffled zinnias.

David Burpee started to learn the business when he was ten by picking sage seeds on the Fordhook Farms for 5¢ an hour. He attended Culver Military Academy, spent summers traveling in Europe with his father to buy new flower seeds, or working at the Floradale Farms as a roguer, i.e., one who picks out rogues, or imperfect plants. After a year at Cornell, David. 22, took over the company when his father died in 1915. He has increased business 14 times to a gross of $6,500,000.

Burpee’s current ambition is to have the marigold named the nation’s floral emblem. He scorns the corn tassel promoted by Illinois’ Senator Paul Douglas (“not a perfect flower”), the carnation backed by Colorado’s Senator Gordon Allott (“Just try to grow them”), and the rose supported by Pennsylvania’s Senator Hugh Scott. Sniffs Burpee: “It is the emblem of England and eight other countries, four of which have fallen behind the Iron Curtain since selecting the rose as their emblem.” He has even registered in Washington as a lobbyist to promote the marigold’s cause.