Franklin J. Campbell, 84; was university floriculturist

Franklin J. Campbell, who decided to become a horticulturist after serving in a field artillery unit during World War II, died Thursday at his Chelmsford home. He was 84.

"All my values had changed," Mr. Campbell said of his service in Africa and Italy, in a story published in the Boston Herald in 1960. "I wanted to spend my life doing something I knew I enjoyed."

Mr. Campbell, who called himself a floriculturist, conducted research at the University of Massachusetts' Waltham Field Station, where he worked to improve methods of growing existing flower varieties and to cross-breed strains that would result in new blooms that would flourish in New England's acidic soil. Among the varieties he created was the salmon-colored carnation.

"He loved his job so much he took it home with him," Dorothy A. (Gordon) said of her husband, who also maintained a showcase flower and vegetable garden on the grounds of his home.

Born and raised in Philadelphia, Mr. Campbell had his first flower garden when he was 11 years old. "It was in the backyard," he said in 1960. "It was lined with rocks. I grew all the old-line flowers in it -- things like cornflowers and sweet William."

His father was a tinsmith who made everything from metal roofs to machine parts and inspired his son to become an engineer. But first he was a laboratory technician at a Philadelphia industrial plant.

"Jobs were scarce in 1938," he said. "I took it."

Among his responsibilities was visiting railyards to check the sugar content of peas and other vegetables.

"He had to get up at an ungodly hour and crawl around in boxcars," said his son, Gordon B. of Dunstable.

Mr. Campbell saved his money for two years before enrolling as an engineering student at Pennsylvania State College. He was there for a year before he was drafted into the Army.

After his military service, he earned a bachelor's degree in horticulture at Penn State and did graduate work at Cornell University.

In 1948, Mr. Campbell became a professor at the University of Massachusetts and a member of the research staff at the Waltham Field Station. He met his wife when he first moved to the area and rented a room in a house next door to a nursing colleague of hers. They were married 51 years.

He was a dutiful father who taught his sons to ride a bicycle and to play baseball by playing catch with them in the front yard. "We loved it," his other son, Brent A. of Derry, N.H., said yesterday, "but he wasn't a sportsman as much as a family man. It was probably torture for him."

He recalled growing up in a home that was always filled with cut flowers and fresh vegetables that his father grew at home or at work.

Since his retirement in 1986, Mr. Campbell enjoyed making furniture, knickknacks, and decorations in his basement woodshop. "He was a man who could use his hands as well as his head," Gordon said.

But what the tall, thin man in the baseball cap, khaki slacks, and Rockports enjoyed most was puttering in his garden. "The neighbors always said they had to compete with him, but he wasn't competing," said his wife. "Growing flowers was more than a job to him. It was his life."

In addition to his wife and sons, he leaves two sisters, Mary Fretz and Bella Sulzbach, both of Pennsylvania; six grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

A funeral will be held tomorrow at 10 a.m. in Morse-Bayliss Funeral Home in Lowell. Burial will be in Pine Ridge Cemetery in Chelmsford.