A modest one-acre property at the corner of Santa Rosa and Sonoma avenues, this was the working home of Luther Burbank from 1884 until his death in 1926. From here, with no formal scientific training, Burbank bred hundreds of new fruits, vegetables, flowers, and grains by crossing thousands of seedlings at a time and ruthlessly destroying any that did not perform. Thomas Edison and Henry Ford visited; he is buried under a Lebanon cedar he planted on the grounds.
The gardens are free and open daily from 8am to dusk. They are still planted with many of his original varieties, including the Shasta daisy, plums, and the strange spineless prickly pear. The Greek Revival cottage and the greenhouse can be visited by guided tour for a small charge, Tuesday through Sunday, April through October. There is no recreated laboratory — Burbank's experimental fields stretched to a much larger property in Sebastopol — but the smaller home garden was where he did his cataloguing and showed off his results.