It was a summer afternoon in the year 1856. The Burbank children and their friends were playing hide-and-seek around the old Burbank house. But Luther was playing another kind of hide-and-seek. His playmates were not boys and girls but honeybees! As he crouched in the deep clover of the meadow, hidden from the other children, he noticed something he never had before.

A big fat honeybee came zooming over the wall, stopped on a blossom and pushed its hairy body deep into the cup of the flower. Luther watched it fly a little way to light on another clover blossom. The greedy bee flew right over the daisies and the beautiful red roses. Luther could not understand. At dinner that night his Cousin Levi told him how bees pollenize just one kind of flower at a time. And Luther had his first experience with a mystery of nature. From that time on he was forever watching the flowers and soil and insects for other mysteries and getting new ideas for better plants and easier ways to make things grow.

One morning Luther's mother asked him to pick the apples from the old tree near the back door so she might make jelly. Alfie, Luther's younger brother, wanted to help, but his mother told him he was not big enough yet. "Wait another year and then you can climb the tree and pick apples, too." she told him. But Alfie would not wait. When his mother went inside he swung himself up into the lowest branches of the tree. He saw a beautiful cluster of fat, rosy apples far out on the end of a limb. He couldn't quite reach it so he stretched farther...and farther...The tree quivered. Alfie lost his balance and fell from the tree. When Luther picked him up he was just scratched a little.

As Alfie sat in the kitchen watching his mother smear black, sticky, Seneca oil on his scratches he stopped crying. "I thought I could climb that old tree," Alfie said, "and I could have done it. Only the apples were so high."

"I know," Luther said, "I guess the tree puts its apples away up there just to make it hard for us to get them. But never mind, Alfie. Someday I will make a tree that is just the right size for little boys to pick apples from."

When Luther Burbank was a world-famous scientist in California he made a tree which grew so low that little boys like Alfie could reach the seven different kinds of apples on that one tree. He made cactus fruit taste like watermelon. He made plums without stones, white blackberries, rose-colored pears, the Shasta daisy. He did all these and many more seemingly miraculous things by seeing ahead far enough to help nature plan.

Olive W. Burt has made Luther Burbank a boy that all boys and girls will want to read about. She writes from first-hand knowledge, for she has talked with Fred Bateman, the only man living who went to school with Luther; she has visited the Wizard's boyhood home near Lancaster, Massachusetts, and walked in the woods there; she has explored his gardens at Santa Rosa in California.

This is a charming tale of how shy young Luther Burbank grew up to become a famous scientist, and it is an important addition to the Childhood of Famous Americans Series.

From the dust jacket