Fordhook Farm is central to Burpee's plans for new growth

DOYLESTOWN, Pa. -- For more than a century Fordhook Farm, the Burpee family's ancestral home, was a center for breeding, testing, and selecting new plants, covering a square mile of Bucks County. It is the birthplace of American iceberg lettuce, Big Boy beefsteak tomatoes, and yellow sweet corn.

But the Pennsylvania acreage was largely sold off as seed growing shifted to contractors in sunny California and abroad. While the Burpees retained Fordhook Farm and its remaining 60 acres as a family residence, they sold the famous seed business in 1972, as fewer and fewer home gardeners took the time to grow their plants from seed. For almost two decades, the catalog passed through corporate hands without much success.

Thirteen years ago, the Burpee Co. was acquired by George C. Ball, whose roots are in the seed business. His grandfather, George Ball, was a competitor of Burpee's founder, W. Atlee Burpee. Ball understands things that perhaps the corporations didn't. "ITT tried to go high tech and built a lab to produce commercial vegetable seedlings. But this is a funky little business. You don't throw money at problems. You just use your bean," said Ball. "Every seed has a different menu for planting, germinating, harvesting, and cleaning. It's a craft."

Today Burpee not only survives, but remains the largest seed source for home gardeners in the United States, selling directly through mail order, over the Internet, and from seed-rack displays in stores. Ball said that 2 million copies of its iconic catalog are mailed to American homes each year and 100 million seed packets are processed and shipped from its 240,000-square-foot office and warehouse complex in nearby Warminster, Pa.

Six years ago, Ball also bought historic Fordhook Farm, determined to reunite it with the Burpee Co. and re-establish it as a horticultural center. With its 18th-century stone manor, and one of only three surviving seed barns in the United States (where seeds were once gleaned by gravity through a chute of sieves), Fordhook Farm is the soulful pastoral alternative to the faceless Warminster factory and is on the National Register of Historic Places.

Ball has added new gardens and a new greenhouse to evaluate the plants not only for Burpee, but for his two other catalogs: He's owned Heronswood, a connoisseur's rare plant nursery in Kingston, Wash., since 2000, and he added The Cook's Garden, which specializes in gourmet European vegetables and greens, last fall.

Ordering from a garden catalog, like buying a car, is an issue of personal identity. "The Cook's Garden is a Volvo and Heronswood is a Jaguar. And Burpee is a Ford pickup truck," said Ball, who lives in W. A. Burpee's picturesque Adirondack-style library atop Fordhook Farm's carriage house.

The Burpee catalog alone offers between 800 and 1,000 varieties, with more than 30 new ones a year, said Don Zeidler, director of direct marketing. It's the new varieties that bring an element of surprise to each catalog edition. Some are hybridized, some are discovered in the wild, and some are natural mutations in someone's field or garden. "Development is the umbrella term," said Ball. "It can mean you find it in Japan. . . . Or you go to foreign markets shopping for vegetables that are not available in the US and you dry out the seeds." That's the story behind Hot Lemon, a pepper discovered by Burpee staff in South America. "It was a local market variety that we brought back. We did some plant breeding to make it more vigorous and productive. We straightened out its genes," said Ball.

Grace Romero, research director at Fordhook, grows and evaluates new plants for performance. She's also in charge of a breeding program at Forkhook.

But most of the breeding is done by a network of 30 contract breeders, one of whom produced Brandy Boy, a popular Burpee tomato introduced last year that was bred from the heirloom variety Brandywine to Burpee's specifications. "In the old days, W. Atlee Burpee did everything. He had to," said Ball. "But in today's era of specialization, there's one guy who's great at breeding salvias, and everyone else has stopped breeding them. And there's another guy who's great at breeding something else."

About half of Burpee's seeds are now produced by farms working exclusively for Burpee in Santa Paula and Lompoc, Calif. The rest are grown by contract growers around the world. Taiwan specializes in melons, Costa Rica in flowers, Indonesia, Chile, and Italy in vegetables.

In the Fordhook Farm spring vegetable garden, pansies, peas, and lettuce are being tested. A still-unnamed pansy with picote edges will soon be introduced by Burpee, along with a cut-flower-type delphinium with double blue flowers called Susan Edmund and two coleus with huge leaves, Kong Rose and Kong Scarlet. All four plants are from European breeders. Since tomato seeds are Burpee's top seller, next year's new varieties are "top secret."

Burpee will also introduce new peppers, lettuce, Swiss chard, and climbing beans next year. "We want to get vertical," said Romano. "Climbing beans allow intensive cultivation in a small space. A lot of people just have a whiskey barrel for growing things."

Inside the greenhouse completed only last month, staff tests the germination rate of seeds of 1,800 varieties sold by Burpee and Cook's (Heronswood sells only plants) or under consideration for next year.

Three categories of perennials from Heronswood that Ball is evaluating as good bets for future popularity are epimediums, geraniums, and hellebores, the last having already been selected by the Perennial Plant Association as Plant of the Year for 2005.

In another test plot, Romero started with 86 cultivars of perennial geraniums from Heronswood that she has winnowed to 20 good performers being considered for propagation. Her favorite geranium varieties include Expresso, Midnight Reiter, Samobor, and Roxanne. With seed sales declining in our time-pressured society, Ball has increased the company's sales of sprouted seeds, perennials, and shrubs. The acquisition of Heronswood has added about 50 perennial offerings to the Burpee catalog, but all plants must be tested for winter hardiness at Fordhook because most gardens are not blessed with Heronswood's almost ideal plant-growing climate on Puget Sound. "A lot of the Heronswood stuff didn't make it here," Ball said. Fordhook Farm has a large trial garden for exotic shade perennials offered by Heronswood, and a sunny 2-acre garden for the drought-tolerant, carefree summer and fall perennials preferred by Burpee customers. The star performers here include tall red mildew-resistant Jacob Kline monarda, and several mildew-resistant phlox: Shortwood, David, Bright Eyes, and Nora Leigh.

Though Burpee has diversified to keep up with changing demand, George Ball's heart remains invested in the seed business. "Are fewer seeds being sold? Sure! But there's this hard core. There's a biological urge to grow what you eat."

W. Atlee Burpee & Co.: 800-888-1447, burpee.com, free catalog. The Cook's Garden: 800-457-9703, cooksgarden.com, free catalog. Heronswood Nursery: 360-297-4172, heronswood.com, catalog $5.