Part IThe Story
The Poultryman at the Door
The story survives in at least two versions, which is fitting for a man whose birthplace the record cannot settle. In one, it is 1872, and a fourteen-year-old boy stands on a platform at a Philadelphia train station, waiting for one of his many overseas correspondents to step off the cars. In the other, the boy is sixteen, and the visitors, several English breeders, mostly of poultry, come to the door of the Burpee family home and knock. Either way, the Englishmen have come expecting a man. They have read his articles in the British poultry journals. They have traded letters with him about breeding programs and the comparative merits of fowl. They have built, as people do from a correspondent's prose, a picture of someone with whiskers and a library and decades of yards behind him.
The person who greets them is a teenager. So the visitor asks the reasonable question, in the version the family has always liked best: Would you be the son of W. Atlee Burpee, the famous poultry authority?
— W. Atlee Burpee, age 14, as retold by his family (The Washington Post, 1996)I am W. Atlee Burpee, the poultryman.
It is a good line, and the Burpees have told it for well over a century, the way families polish the one anecdote that seems to contain the whole person. The boy offers his hand. The authority and the child are the same body. The expert the Englishmen crossed an ocean to meet has not finished growing.
What the anecdote hides is how much of the next hundred and fifty years it anticipates. A business conducted almost entirely by mail, in which strangers form their picture of you from the printed page. A founder whose authority arrives before his credentials. A name, W. Atlee Burpee, that people trust before they have met the man and will go on trusting long after he is dead. And a question that would come back, decades later, with its terms reversed: Would you be the son of W. Atlee Burpee? That one would get answered too, by a twenty-two-year-old summoned home from Cornell.
Between those two answers lies the construction of something that had not existed before 1876: a seed company built on research rather than surplus, sold through the mail to people its founder would never meet, promising them a single thing (that what they planted would come up) in a country where, it turned out, much of what grew in Europe would not.
A Name Carried Across a Border
Start with the name, because the name is the asset.
Burpee, according to one account of the family's history, is the Americanized form of Beaupé, the surname of French Huguenots, Protestants whose faith had made them unwelcome in Catholic France and who scattered across the Atlantic world. The New York Times, in its 1980 obituary of Atlee's son, described the founder as "the descendant of a family of Huguenots who moved to Philadelphia from Canada." So the name had already been transplanted at least twice before it ever appeared on a seed packet: once out of France, once into English, and then southward across a border that, when Atlee was born, still separated a republic from a colony of the British Crown.
He was born Washington Atlee Burpee, in 1858. The Washington is a strange thing to carry out of British North America, and he did not carry it far; he went by Atlee, his mother's maiden name, and signed himself W. Atlee Burpee for the rest of his life. Most sources give his birthday as April 5. Wikipedia's own infobox says April 8, then contradicts itself in the first line of the article. The birthplace is worse. The careful accounts (the Seedsmen Hall of Fame, the Mercer Museum, the 1916 Encyclopedia of Pennsylvania Biography cited by Wikipedia) put it at Sheffield, in the Colony of New Brunswick. The Smithsonian Libraries' seed-trade entry and a 1996 Washington Post feature both say New Brunswick, New Jersey, a different country entirely and an easy clerical slide. A gardening podcast, marking the anniversary of his death, says he "immigrated from England with his parents." I don't know how one man accumulates three birthplaces. The likeliest explanation is the boring one, careless repetition compounding over decades. It is also true that the founder of the most American of seed houses arrives in the documentary record already a little hard to locate, already from somewhere else.
The family moved to Philadelphia in 1861, the year the Civil War began. His father, David Burpee, practiced medicine there, as had his grandfather. On his mother's side, Anne Catherine Atlee was the great-granddaughter of William Augustus Atlee, a Pennsylvania jurist of the Revolutionary era. Through her, by the family's reckoning, ran a more surprising kinship: Luther Burbank, the Massachusetts-born plant breeder who would become the most famous horticulturist in America, was a cousin. The two men's surnames differ by a consonant and a vowel. Their careers would differ by temperament: Burbank the solitary wizard of the experimental garden, Burpee the merchant who wanted the experiment to end in a catalog.
The household's expectation was plain. Burpee men became physicians. The boy, meanwhile, was keeping chickens, geese, and turkeys in the city, which in the 1870s was still possible, and which in his case was not really a hobby. By fourteen he was designing breeding programs, writing articles for poultry journals, and corresponding with experts in England. According to the Post, he raised exotic ducks and chickens from China and India alongside the breeds favored by the waves of European immigrants then arriving in American ports. Even his flock was a census of transplants.
He enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania. Here the record forks again: most accounts say medical school; Wikipedia says the law school; the Seedsmen Hall of Fame says he graduated in 1878. The weight of the sources is that he studied medicine, hated it, and left after two years. The Pennsylvania Center for the Book reports, without elaboration, that his father was angry. His mother was "more relenting." She lent him $1,000.
By the Numbers
The House of Burpee, 1876–1915
$1,000Loan from his mother that capitalized the business in 1876
48 → 200Pages in the first catalog versus the 1915 catalog
1,000,000Catalogs mailed per year by 1915
10,000Orders received per day at peak, at his death
30,000Miles traveled annually in search of seeds before World War I
300Employees when he died, at the largest seed company in the world
The Customers Asked for Cabbage
On May 10, 1876, the Centennial Exposition opened in Philadelphia's Fairmount Park, and the city became, for six months, the showroom of a nation that had decided to celebrate its first hundred years by displaying its machines. Visitors saw Alexander Graham Bell's telephone. They saw a gigantic sculpted arm holding a torch, a fragment of a statue that did not yet have a harbor to stand in. They saw electric arc lights. The historian Robert Elman, in a short biography titled "The Legacy of W. Atlee Burpee," described a country "still recovering from the cataclysmic upheaval of the Civil War, the agonies of Reconstruction, and a severe economic depression," yet gripped by "an almost unrestrained optimism—faith in scientific, social, and cultural progress resulting from self-reliant, individual achievement."
Burpee was eighteen. He went, like everyone, and he went, the company's own history insists, to the halls of agriculture and horticulture. Forty years later he would write about that summer in the third person, as though describing a stranger he was fond of: "A boy of 18 who was thrilled with the wonders of the Centennial Exhibition, full of enthusiasm, he was just beginning to appreciate that working with the soil is the biggest work that can be done."
That same year, with his mother's money and a partner whose name the popular accounts do not preserve, he started a mail-order poultry business out of the family home. The company's history lists chickens, dogs, and sheep. A neighborhood remembers him at 219 Church Street. A 2025 interview with the company's current owner places an early stand at Fifth and Market. Poultry farmers across the Northeast already knew his name from the journals, and some of them came to Philadelphia to look at the prodigy. He opened a store. To the birds he added corn seed, sold as feed. It was an accessory to the real business, the way a pet shop sells bags of millet.
Then the customers started asking for other things.
Cabbage seed. Carrot. Cauliflower. Cucumber. The farmers who bought his fowl needed, it turned out, a dependable source of vegetable seed, and they assumed (correctly, as it happened) that the young man who was so exacting about the bloodlines of his chickens would be exacting about this too. Burpee noticed which part of the counter drew the crowd. By 1877, his second year in business, the company's history says, he had begun reshaping the enterprise around seed. In 1878 he dropped the partner and formally founded W. Atlee Burpee & Company. (Which is why the Smithsonian's archivists, who have spent years inside the company's records, date the firm to 1878, while the firm itself, and its 150th-anniversary packaging in 2026, insist on 1876. Both are defensible. The company prefers the year of the Centennial, and it is not hard to see why.)
He did not drop the poultry. This is the detail that keeps snagging. Live birds stayed in the Burpee catalog until the 1940s, long after their founder was dead and long after anyone could have mistaken the firm for anything but a seed house. In 1879 he published The Poultry Yard: How to Furnish and Manage It, "a treatise for the amateur poultry breeder and farmer," and the company was still reissuing it in 1895. He moved toward the demand without abandoning the people who had first trusted him. The chicken customers became seed customers. The poultryman stayed in the back of the book.
Europe's Misfits
There was a problem with American seed in the 1870s, and it was that much of it was not really American.
The seed trade itself was old. David Landreth, an Englishman, had arrived in Philadelphia in 1781 and founded his seed company in 1784; it would later relocate to Bloomsdale Farms in Bristol, Bucks County, the same county where Burpee would eventually put down his own roots. But the business model of the established houses, as the reference histories describe it, was essentially agricultural surplus: large landowners growing more of their main crops than they needed and selling the excess as seed. Few new varieties entered the market. For anything novel, American seedsmen relied on European breeders.
And European varieties, Burpee concluded from his own trials and from the steady correspondence of his customers, often did poorly in American ground. The company's history attributes the conclusion to "his research work and correspondence with customers." George Ball, who has owned Burpee since 1991, tells a more specific version, which is his telling and should be read as such: that Burpee's customers kept asking why European vegetable seeds failed in America; that the young man suspected latitude and weather, the shorter summer days of a more southerly country, the violent swings of temperature, the alternation of drenching wet and punishing drought; and that he then inverted the question. If plants that thrived in Europe's mild, even, long-days summers struggled in America, might some plants that failed in Europe thrive here? In Ball's account, Burpee went to Europe the following summer and collected seed from the failures, the varieties that couldn't make it in their native climate. Some of those misfits turned out to be at home in Pennsylvania. From them, Ball says, came the first major collection of vegetables adapted to America.
Whether the story happened exactly so, I cannot confirm from the documents. Its shape is what matters, and its shape recurs throughout Burpee's life: something that doesn't fit where it started, carried across an ocean, tested in new soil, and kept only if it grows.
He began offering what he found. In 1877, a cabbage called 'Surehead.' In 1881, an improved carrot called 'Long Orange.' Through the 1880s, garden and lima beans, celery, sweet peppers. He wrote about how to use them, in How and What to Grow in a Kitchen Garden of One Acre (1888, with E. D. Darlington and L. M. Moll), and in Root Crops for Stock Feeding, and How to Grow Them, which the title page describes, tellingly, as "compiled from the prize essays and practical experience." Even his manuals were partly written by his customers, who had competed for the privilege.
In 1888 he bought a farmstead of several hundred acres on New Britain Road in Doylestown, Bucks County, and named it Fordhook. The main house was fieldstone, its oldest section predating 1798. Around it went a barn, a springhouse, a carriage house, a seed house, two greenhouses. It became the family's home and, more consequentially, an outdoor laboratory where every variety Burpee intended to sell was first grown and judged. Wikipedia calls it "likely the first experimental test field station in the United States"; the company calls Burpee "the first research-based seed company" in the country. The cautious version and the proud version are both describing the same idea: that a seed merchant should know, from his own fields, what his seeds would do before he took anyone's money for them.
Fordhook specialized in onions, beets, carrots, peas, and cabbage. In 1909 Burpee added two more stations, each assigned to a climate: Floradale Farms in Lompoc, California, for sweet peas, and Sunnybrook Farms near Swedesboro, New Jersey, for the heat-loving crops (tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, squashes). Before World War I, according to the Mercer Museum, he traveled more than 30,000 miles a year looking for seed, through Europe and across the United States, visiting farms and sending specimens home to be tried. Those that survived the trials were crossed with sturdier stock and bred toward something that could live here.
In 1894 he introduced a lettuce that stayed crisp far longer than anything else on the market, and called it Iceberg. The company says the name was for its crispness; another account holds that it came from heads shipped packed in crushed ice. Either way, the company's history credits it with something larger than a vegetable: "Year-round salads suddenly appeared in both homes and restaurants." That a lettuce bred by a Philadelphia seedsman should become the default American salad, the wedge in every steakhouse, is the kind of fact that sounds like trivia and is actually a statement about how national taste gets made: by someone choosing, in a test field, what is worth keeping.
The sweet peas from Lompoc had a stranger destiny. Before Burpee, according to one popular history of the company, sweet peas were largely imported from England. By the First World War, Burpee was selling more of them than anyone in the world, and outselling British seed houses in England itself. The flow had reversed. The transplant had gone home and beaten the natives.
— W. Atlee Burpee, Fortieth Anniversary Supplement, 1876–1916As time went on, however, he began to think the very best thing he could do was to plant RELIABILITY in folks' gardens.
The Catalog Was a Letter From a Stranger
Seeds are light. That is the whole insight, and it is not a small one.
A sack of grain is a freight problem. A packet of seed weighs almost nothing, does not spoil if kept dry, and fits in an envelope. Which meant that a seed merchant in Philadelphia, alone among most merchants of the age, could reach a farm in Kansas with nothing heavier than a letter, if the letter could get there. In 1863, Congress established free city delivery, requiring post offices to bring mail directly to residents' homes. In 1896 the government began extending free delivery to rural routes. Burpee built a business on top of a piece of federal infrastructure that he did not pay for and that was, in the 1870s and 1880s, still only partly built. By the time Rural Free Delivery spread across the countryside, he was ready.
The catalog was the business. His first ran forty-eight pages. Because most of his customers were farmers, he called it Burpee's Farm Annual. He wrote most of the copy himself, and he went on writing it after the firm had an advertising department, which is a fact that tells you more about him than any of the honors. The Mercer Museum records his method: traveling in Europe, he kept a field book of data and observations, and on the voyage home he studied his notes; the field book, with some editing, became that year's catalog. The thing the farmer opened in January was, in some literal sense, the founder's diary of the previous summer.
Read one, if you can. A facsimile of Burpee's Novelties in Vegetables for 1895 is still in print, and what strikes a modern reader is how personal it sounds, how much it resembles a letter from someone who wants you to succeed.
He broke with convention repeatedly, and every break pointed the same direction. The trade's catalogs were full of cultural instructions, how to sow, how to thin, how to water; Burpee cut much of that and put in testimonial letters and plant descriptions instead. He stopped teaching the reader to garden and started showing the reader other people who had gardened successfully with Burpee seed, which is a different and more potent thing. The 1891 catalog was the first in the trade to carry engravings made from photographs. By 1901 the process was mechanized. Hand-drawn idealizations of vegetables, which could depict a melon as large as the artist's ambition, began to disappear from American catalogs, and Burpee's adoption of photography is generally credited with driving the change across the industry. For color, he bought European plates and hired immigrant watercolorists from Germantown. Later the company would commission artists such as Paul de Longpré and Alois Lunzer. The pictures made a promise. The photographs made the promise checkable.
In 1890 he did something that sounds, in retrospect, almost modern: he offered cash prizes for the best advertisements, and out of that competition came the slogan Burpee's Seeds Grow. Three words. A claim about the product so basic that no competitor would have thought to make it, because what else would seeds do? But anyone who has planted a row of something and watched nothing come up knows what the slogan was really selling. It did not promise beauty or abundance. It promised that the thing would not fail.
The orders came in by the thousands. So did the letters, thousands every year, thanking him. He kept them. The current owner says Burpee "made copious and detailed notes of his conversations with customers and preserved these archives, diaries, and records of all his experiments." When a Burpee family member finally donated the company's papers to the Smithsonian in 2016, the archivists found roughly two hundred bankers boxes of material, which Christopher DeMairo describes in The Burpee Seed Company: Planting U.S. History since the Nineteenth Century as including "crumbling letters begrimed by decades of dirt." A Smithsonian archivist working through the founder's business files reported "detailed notes scribbled all over scraps of paper." DeMairo, interviewed for the company's 150th anniversary, called him "a really fascinating man, and one of the most prolific businessmen" — and the sentence, in the published piece, trails off there, as if the archivist had run out of breath.
In 1910 the catalog dropped a word from its title. Burpee's Farm Annual became Burpee's Annual. The historian Maureen Thompson reads the change as an index of a country in motion: agrarian life receding, cities swelling, the kinship networks through which rural families had once saved and swapped seed dissolving into anonymous transactions with mail-order houses. The customer base now included home gardeners, market growers, canners. The farmer who had been the catalog's first reader was becoming one constituency among several. The man who sold to him had, in a sense, helped make him optional.
By 1915 the catalog ran two hundred pages and went out to a million households.
Hog Feed
Some of Burpee's most famous products he did not breed at all. He found them, bought them, and then did the harder work of convincing Americans to want them.
The lima bean that would carry the farm's name began with a man named Asa Palmer, a Pennsylvania bean farmer whom Burpee met on his travels. Palmer believed he had one plant, a single plant, that resisted cutworms. Burpee took the plant and turned it into the Fordhook lima, which became one of the company's signature items for generations. The founder's 1916 anniversary letter, reaching for an image of how much the world had changed since 1876, lists it in the same breath as the electric streetcar and the phonograph: "And there were no Bush Limas, and no Golden Bantam corn!"
The corn is the better story.
William Chambers was a farmer in Greenfield, Massachusetts, who had grown a small, golden-yellow sweet corn. Chambers died. A friend found some of the seed among what he left behind and sold it to Burpee. In 1902, Golden Bantam appeared in the catalog.
Nobody bought it.
The problem was not the corn. The problem was color. Before 1900, as nearly every account of this episode emphasizes, Americans believed yellow corn was for animals. Respectable sweet corn was white. "This is the first yellow sweet corn," George Ball told a reporter at the 2026 Philadelphia Flower Show, holding up the anniversary packet. "Before that, yellow corn was hog feed. The kernels were hard. This yellow corn was a totally new taste. It's delicious. But for two years, nobody bought it because to them it was hog feed."
Two solutions emerged, and they are worth holding side by side because they are such different kinds of genius. The first came from the field: according to the encyclopedia accounts, farmers who believed in the variety began slipping ears of Golden Bantam in among the white corn they sold, letting customers discover the taste before their prejudices could intervene. Smuggling, essentially. The second came from the office: in Ball's telling, an assistant at the company coined the phrase Looks like butter, tastes like butter, and the variety took off. A product that had been stigmatized by its color was redeemed by a description of that same color. Within a few years Americans had converted to yellow corn so thoroughly that the conversion became invisible. Hardly anyone now remembers that there was a prejudice to overcome.
Which is the oldest American story there is, told about a vegetable. The thing dismissed as fit only for the barnyard, the misfit from a dead man's farm in western Massachusetts, became the national standard, and nobody remembers it was ever otherwise.
Reliability Is a Warehouse
In February 1915, the Journal of the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce sent someone to the Burpee warehouse at Fifth and Buttonwood Streets, and the resulting article opens with a sentence that sounds like it was written by someone who had been talking to Burpee for a long time: "The man who can look upon the seeds and tell which will grow and which will not is one of the world's benefactors."
Then it goes further, into something close to dread. "Mankind at no time has more than eight months' provisions ahead. Should all the crops of the earth fail in a single season, our farmers become possessed of improvidence and fail to keep a stock of seed for the next planting-time civilization would be swept out of existence in less than a year." In the warehouse, the writer continued, was stored "in embryo the sustenance of a large portion of the earth's inhabitants."
Grandiose, yes. Also accurate about what Burpee understood himself to be selling. Not seed. Certainty.
The article is the most detailed contemporary account of how that certainty was manufactured, and it reads like a quality-control manual. The Burpee farms, the writer notes, "could not raise a hundredth part of the seeds the firm sells." The bulk of production was contracted out to growers in different parts of the world, two and three years ahead of the selling date. Burpee's people monitored those distant crops and filed reports on their condition. "Unless they are fully 'Burpee Standard' in quality the entire crop is rejected." Not culled. Rejected, whole. When seed did arrive in bulk at the warehouse, a sample of each lot was shipped to the Burpee farms and grown out in the firm's own trials before anything was packed. "Nine times out of ten results confirm the original grower's statement. But if a bad streak does develop, the seed is discarded." Every lot carried a stock number by which it could be traced through the building. In the order room, clerks walked the rows of racks assembling packets, and every order was checked twice, "for there must be no mistakes." The order, the writer adds, "may come from South Africa."
And behind every packet, a guarantee. If a customer was not satisfied, Burpee would replace the seed for up to a full year after purchase. The firm still describes the guarantee as dating to 1876.
"Mr. Burpee will tell you that he has built up this great business by advertising," the Chamber's writer observed, "and to a great extent this is so, but back of it all has been the integrity and the enthusiasm of the founder." The two halves of that sentence are not really in tension. The advertising was a promise, Burpee's Seeds Grow, and the warehouse was the machinery for keeping it. A slogan that is false is a liability. A slogan that is true, every time, ten thousand orders a day, is a moat.
He did not confine himself to his own walls. In 1893, at thirty-five, Burpee was elected president of the American Seed Trade Association, the head of the industry he had entered as an upstart. Thompson's research finds him joining trade associations, corresponding with political figures, and traveling to Washington, D.C. (the man named Washington, going to Washington) to represent the seed industry's interests as the federal government asserted new authority over monopolies and private enterprise. His actions, she writes, "challenged government mandates." He lobbied for his company and for his trade at once, as though he did not see much difference.
In Philadelphia he was something else as well. He supported and sat on the board of the Sunday Breakfast Rescue Mission, one of the first homeless shelters and soup kitchens in America. The man who worried, or whose admirers worried on his behalf, that civilization was eight months from starvation also spent time on the people for whom it already was.
— W. Atlee Burpee, Fortieth Anniversary Supplement, 1876–1916The reliable horse is the best in the stable, even if he isn't the handsomest or fastest.
The Son of W. Atlee Burpee
Around 1913, Atlee Burpee fell ill. His eldest son, David, left his studies in agriculture at Cornell to help run the business. On November 26, 1915, two days after Thanksgiving, the founder died at Fordhook Farm. He was fifty-seven. The Seedsmen Hall of Fame records the cause of death as cirrhosis of the liver, and the plot: Doylestown Cemetery, Section M, Plot 49. He left behind three hundred employees, a million catalogs a year, ten thousand orders a day, and what was by then the largest seed company in the world.
David Burpee was twenty-two. He had, according to the Times, "only a few months' study in horticulture." He had been born on April 5, 1893, which is to say, if the majority of sources are right about the father, on Atlee's thirty-fifth birthday. At ten he had earned his first wages on Fordhook Farm, picking sage seeds for five cents an hour. He had been sent to Culver Military Academy in Indiana. Now he was being handed the house that his father had built, and asked, in effect, the question the English visitors had asked at the door four decades before. Would you be the son of W. Atlee Burpee? He would. The harder question was whether he would be anything else.
He answered by turning the company toward flowers. His father's heart had been in vegetables; David's was in bloom and color, and he moved the firm's emphasis almost immediately. In 1917 the company was incorporated, with David as president, and recorded $900,000 in sales. That same war gave him his first great campaign: with overseas seed supplies cut off and food short, he pushed a War Gardens program aimed at city people, teaching apartment dwellers and suburbanites to grow their own food (with Burpee seed). A generation later, when the Second World War brought shortages again, the idea came back as the Victory Garden, and the hybrid vegetables the company had been developing in the interim (hardier, more disease-resistant, higher-yielding) helped wartime gardeners raise what the Times called "bumper crops."
He inherited his father's appetite for customer participation and amplified it. In 1924 the company announced a contest inviting letters on the theme "What Burpee's Seeds Have Done for Me," and thousands came in from around the world by the August deadline, many of them written by women, as the rhetoric scholar Cheryl Price-McKell has documented, women who used the occasion to publicly claim the identity of successful gardeners. The Smithsonian's archivists, reading them ninety years later, found that "almost every letter offers the same praise, affirming the motto." In 1926, a few years into radio's golden age, the company ran a "largest zinnia" contest through WLIT in Philadelphia; the station forwarded every letter to Burpee. One, from a Mrs. E. Shepherd of West Philadelphia, is still in the archive.
David's era was also, unmistakably, more theatrical than his father's. Each year, just before catalog season, he "unveiled" his newest introduction at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, before as many as four thousand guests (horticulturists, garden-club members, the press), all bearing engraved invitations. He named new flowers after the famous: Mrs. Douglas MacArthur, Pearl Buck, Kate Smith, Helen Hayes, Mamie Eisenhower. He "handed out seed packets the way John D. Rockefeller handed out dimes," in one description preserved by the Mercer Museum. And he pursued, with something close to evangelism, the newest science.
In the 1930s the company began systematic cross-breeding for disease resistance. In 1932 David seized on 'Golden Gleam,' a double nasturtium out of Mexico with ten petals instead of five, sweet-scented but available in only one color, and launched a breeding program to cross it with common nasturtiums. Forty thousand hybrid crosses later, the 1937 catalog devoted four full pages to the results. The 'Ambrosia' cantaloupe came out of this period, and in 1949, the 'Big Boy' tomato, which quickly became the company's best seller. In 1941 Burpee introduced a pair of calendulas called the "X-Ray Twins," which David said descended from seeds exposed to X-rays in 1933. In the 1940s his breeders used colchicine, a compound extracted from crocus, to alter flowers' chromosomes, producing 'Bright Scarlet' and 'Rosabel' snapdragons and the 'Ruffled Jumbo Scarlet' zinnia.
He liked to frame these methods as a generational contrast. As the historian Helen Anne Curry recounts, David estimated that "in his father's time" a breeder chanced upon a useful mutation "once in every 900,000 plants." He and his breeders, armed with radiation and chemistry, "could turn them out once in every 900 plants."
— David Burpee, as quoted by Helen Anne Curry, University of CambridgeOnce in every 900,000 plants … once in every 900 plants.
It was a son's boast, and a revealing one. The father had traveled thirty thousand miles a year looking for the one plant in a field that was different. The son wanted to manufacture difference on demand.
The marigold became his obsession. In the 1920s sweet peas were still the company's best-selling flower seed, the same sweet peas his father had grown at Lompoc and sold back to England, but root disease was undermining their hardiness, and David went looking for a successor. The marigold was hardy and bright and had, in the Times's phrase, a "kerosene-like smell." He set out in 1919 to fix its limited colors, its scrawniness, its late bloom. The program was faltering when, the Times reports, a missionary in Tibet sent a sampling of seeds, and from them the company developed an odorless golden-orange marigold called Crown of Gold. By 1960 the marigold was the best-selling flower in the United States.
Once again: the solution arrived by mail, from far away, from a stranger.
He wanted more. Back in 1919 he had imagined a contest to produce a white marigold, but had shelved the idea because he doubted the hybridization could succeed. In the 1954 catalog he offered it anyway: $10,000 to any gardener who could produce a pure white marigold. Then he waited. In 1959 he launched a campaign to make the marigold the national flower of the United States, calling it "a flower of all the people" and "a symbol of the desire of the United States for peace and friendship with all the peoples of the world." He registered in Washington as a lobbyist on its behalf. He lost.
Twenty-one years after the contest was announced, in 1975, the prize went to Alice Vonk, a sixty-seven-year-old widow in Sully, Iowa. She had already received $100 the previous year as one of six gardeners nationwide whose marigolds came closest. Her method was the oldest one there is, the one David's mutation statistics were supposed to make obsolete: every season she saved the seed from the palest flowers in her garden and planted it again, for more than two decades, until one bloom, two and a half inches across, came up pure white. Her entry beat 8,200 others. The newspapers called it "the costliest flower ever." The Pella Chronicle ran the headline "Sully Woman's Life Unchanged After Producing Prize Marigold." The company sold the result as Burpee's Best Whites.
The father's method, patient selection, one plant at a time, by an amateur correspondent far away, had won the son's contest.
David, by then, no longer owned the company.
The Name Without the Family
In 1959, David's Burpee recorded more than $6 million in sales and called itself the largest seed-catalog mail-order house in the world. In 1960 it mailed four million annuals. In 1970, at seventy-seven, David sold the company to General Foods for $10 million. He stayed on as a consultant. In 1974 the company left its north Philadelphia home for a new headquarters at 300 Park Avenue in Warminster. In 1979, the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation bought it from General Foods and paired it with another subsidiary, O.M. Scott & Sons, the lawn-care company.
David Burpee died at Doylestown Hospital on June 24, 1980, at eighty-seven. The memorial service was held at Fordhook. The Times quoted his explanation for why he had spent his life the way he had: "If you want to be happy for an hour, get drunk. If you want to be happy for a weekend, get married. If you want to be happy for a whole week, kill your pig and eat it. But if you want to be happy all your life, become a gardener."
The next year, 1981, experimentation and seed production left Fordhook Farm.
What followed was the long, instructive decline of a brand separated from its proof ground. American gardens were shrinking, from an average of 600 square feet to 325, according to the American Gardening Association figures cited by the Times in 1987, and gardeners increasingly bought transplants at chain stores rather than starting from seed. ITT folded Burpee's retail sales force into Scott in a cost-cutting move. The retail customer list fell from 15,000 in 1980 to 7,500. William John Park, chairman of the George W. Park Seed Company, Burpee's chief mail-order rival, offered the most generous diagnosis: "Burpee is and has been a first-class company, but it had problems because of the instability of not knowing who was going to run it next month."
When ITT restructured, the investment firm Clayton & Dubilier acquired Burpee as part of a $150 million package with Scott. Carter F. Bales, a forty-nine-year-old senior partner at McKinsey & Company and a longtime Burpee customer, was on a flight home from California, reading a magazine article about the ITT restructuring, when the last sentence mentioned that Burpee was on the block. "I almost said, 'Stop the plane!'" he told the Times. With Robert S. Barron, a thirty-six-year-old former McKinsey colleague, he bought it in a $15 million leveraged buyout in 1987. That December a new computer, switched on just before peak season, produced back orders, double billing, and late deliveries. "It was a classic mistake," Barron said. The founder's grandson, Jonathan Burpee, forty-six, was director of customer relations. "We lost business," he said, "and a bit of the edge."
"There's a feeling here," Barron said, "that the company has been freed from the shackles of corporate America. There's a sense that the old Burpee is back."
It wasn't, quite. In 1991, with Burpee in financial trouble, the company turned to one of its suppliers, George J. Ball, Inc., a family horticultural firm founded in Chicago by a breeder of sweet peas, asters, and calendulas named George Jacob Ball. His grandson, George Ball Jr., who had gone from Bard College into product research at the family's Panamerican Seed subsidiary in 1975, was installed as chief executive. His memory of the situation, offered decades later, is that "Burpee was going to be padlocked," 240 days behind on payments, some of them owed to his own family's company, and that he bought it for "kind of a poem." He diagnosed the brand's confusion with a musician's metaphor: the company had been trying to become a fancy plant business, "which, given its customer, was like trying to push Mozart on people who like country music."
In 1993, Jonathan Burpee was terminated. He was the last member of the family to work for the company that bore its name.
Ball did well, and then he did too much. Burpee became the exclusive supplier of the Martha Stewart seed line at Kmart. It launched a website in 1995. It opened its own retail stores in 2000. Between 1998 and 2000 Ball bought a garden-furniture maker called Benchsmith, a travel publisher, the customer list of the defunct Garden.com, and Heronswood, a celebrated mail-order plant nursery, trying to stretch the brand across the off-season. In the fall of 2001, the company's 125th anniversary year, Burpee filed for bankruptcy. "We won't try for big growth again," Ball said, "not in my lifetime."
But in 1998 he had also done the one thing that, read against everything above, looks less like nostalgia than like diagnosis. He bought Fordhook Farm and set about restoring it as a horticultural center. The 60-acre property opens to the public once a year.
In the spring of 2020, as the world went into lockdown, Burpee sold more seed than at any time in its history. Americans, confined to their houses, discovered again that seeds are light and arrive by mail. At the 2026 Philadelphia Flower Show, Ball, by then seventy-four, stood at the Burpee booth and lifted the 150th-anniversary collection from a wooden rack: nine packets of "Historic Breakthroughs," among them Iceberg lettuce (1894), Golden Bantam (1902), and Big Boy (1949). "We're celebrating our 150th," he said, and still selling those same seeds.
"What Sears taught us about living," Ball once said, "Burpee taught us about growing."
Where We Began
In the last months of his life, Atlee Burpee wrote a letter to his customers. It was meant for a fortieth-anniversary supplement covering the years 1876 to 1916, and it was addressed as all his best copy was: "To My Friends, Our Customers."
He wrote it, as he had written so much else, in the voice of someone describing a boy. "Forty years is a long time, especially when it's the forty that separates a boy of 18 from a man of 58." He listed what the world had lacked when that boy opened his doors: electric lights were a rarity, telephones not in general use, no electric streetcars, no snapshot cameras, the first successful automobile still fifteen years off; anyone talking about wireless telegraphy would have been thought crazy, and the idea of being able to "'can' talk and singing in a machine" would have marked a man a fool. "And there were no Bush Limas, and no Golden Bantam corn!"
He wrote about reliability, the word he set in capitals, and about failure. "It has meant a good deal of work, a good many disappointments and failures—this forty years of working up to our present standard—and we have not yet reached our aim. Progress is still our watchword." He wrote to every planter "whether of a flowerbed or a fifty-acre field" who knew "how discouragement dogs a fellow once in a while and how it takes nerve and grit to face the music sometimes." He called the United States, which had not been the country of his birth, "the best country on earth."
He never became the man of fifty-eight. He died that November, at fifty-seven, at Fordhook, five months short of the birthday the letter assumed.
The supplement survives in the Henry G. Gilbert Nursery and Seed Trade Catalog Collection, scanned, its pages slightly misread by the machine that digitized them. In the middle of the founder's letter, interrupting a sentence about the planters who read his words, the scanner caught a caption from an illustration on the page, five words set off on their own, printed beneath a picture of a beginning by a man who had always answered the door himself:
Where we began in 1876.
Part IIThe Playbook
What follows is not a summary of Burpee's career but an extraction from it: the operating principles that seem, on the evidence of the record, to have made a medical-school dropout with a $1,000 loan into the largest seed company in the world within four decades, and to have kept the brand alive through a century of stewards who understood those principles to varying degrees. Some are specific to a business of shipping living things through the mail. Most are not.
The principles
- 1.Earn authority on paper before you earn it in person.
- 2.Let your customers pull you out of your first business, but keep the door open behind you.
- 3.Harvest the other market's failures.
- 4.Own the proof ground.
- 5.Write the copy yourself.
- 6.Replace instructions with evidence.
- 7.Ride infrastructure someone else is building.
- 8.Make the slogan an engineering spec.
- 9.Pay your customers to build your brand.
- 10.Buy the discovery, then fix the story.
- 11.Represent the trade, not just the firm.
- 12.Never sell the engine with the name.
The English poultry breeders who came to Philadelphia expected a man, because everything they knew of W. Atlee Burpee came from his writing: articles in their own journals, letters full of breeding data. By the time anyone saw his face, his authority was already settled. He had accumulated reputation through the one channel that did not reveal his age.
This is not a story about precocity. It is a story about the asymmetry of written expertise: in a medium where only the work is visible, the work is all that is judged. Burpee would build his entire company on that asymmetry. The catalog was a document from a stranger that a million households trusted; the customers who knew him only by the name on the packet were in the same position as those English visitors, forming a picture from prose. He learned at fourteen that the picture could be made true.
Tactic: Publish substantive, specific work in the venues your future customers already read, long before you ask them for anything, and let the work stand in for credentials you don't yet have.
Principle 2
Let your customers pull you out of your first business, but keep the door open behind you
Burpee did not set out to sell seed. He set out to sell chickens, and sold corn as feed. The pivot to vegetable seed was dictated by the people at his counter, who asked for cabbage, carrot, cauliflower, and cucumber, and by his willingness to notice which requests drew the most traffic. Within two years, the accessory had become the company.
The underrated part is what he did not do. Live poultry stayed in the Burpee catalog until the 1940s, decades after it had stopped mattering to revenue. He kept publishing The Poultry Yard into the 1890s. The customers who had trusted the poultryman were never told their business was no longer wanted; they were simply offered more. A pivot that abandons its first believers spends their trust. A pivot that carries them along compounds it.
Tactic: When demand pulls you toward a new product, follow it decisively, but keep serving the original customer at the margin until that line dies of natural causes rather than executive decision.
Principle 3
Harvest the other market's failures
The American seed trade of the 1870s imported its novelty from Europe and suffered for it: varieties bred for one climate faltered in another. Whether or not Burpee literally collected seeds from plants that failed in Europe, as George Ball tells it, the logic of his early program was an inversion of the trade's assumption. The best source of product for an American market was not Europe's winners. It was whatever, wherever, would actually thrive here, and that was something only a local test could reveal.
The pattern repeats across the company's history in ways that look almost deliberate. Golden Bantam came from a dead farmer's leftover seed. The Fordhook lima came from a single cutworm-resistant plant in Asa Palmer's field. The odorless marigold came from a missionary in Tibet. The white marigold came from a widow in Iowa. In each case the source was marginal, overlooked, or out of place, and the value was created by transplanting it into a context where it fit.
Tactic: Systematically examine what fails or is ignored in adjacent markets, and test whether the conditions that made it fail there are absent in yours.
Principle 4
Own the proof ground
Fordhook Farm, established in 1888, was the strategic center of the company: a place where every variety was grown and judged before it was sold. When Burpee needed to test crops that wanted different conditions, he did not stretch Fordhook; he built specialized stations, Floradale in Lompoc for sweet peas and Sunnybrook in New Jersey for the heat-lovers. Each proof ground was matched to the question it needed to answer.
The proof ground is what converts a merchant into a manufacturer of certainty. It is also what turned Burpee from a seed reseller, like the landowners who sold their surplus, into something the reference histories call the first "modern" seed company, "based entirely on plant breeding and product innovation." Its absence is visible too: experimentation left Fordhook in 1981, the same decade in which the brand drifted, lost its sales force, and was flipped between owners. When George Ball bought Fordhook back in 1998, he was buying, among other things, the company's memory of what it was for.
F
The Proof Grounds
Burpee matched each testing station to the climate its crops needed.
| Station | Location | Founded | Specialty |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fordhook Farm | Doylestown, Pennsylvania | 1888 | Onions, beets, carrots, peas, cabbage |
| Floradale Farms | Lompoc, California | 1909 | Sweet peas |
| Sunnybrook Farms | Near Swedesboro, New Jersey | 1909 | Tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, squashes |
Tactic: Build a proprietary environment where you test your product under real conditions before customers do, and treat it as the last asset you would ever sell.
Principle 5
Write the copy yourself
Burpee set up an advertising department. He still wrote most of the catalog copy himself, until the year he died. His method, kept in a field book through the summer's travels, studied on the voyage home, edited into that year's catalog, meant that the thing customers read each January was a direct transcription of the founder's own observations from the field.
This mattered because, in a mail-order business, the catalog is the only salesperson. Its voice is the company's voice. A founder who delegates that voice too early delegates the trust that has accrued to it. Burpee's prose was specific, enthusiastic, personal; it addressed readers as "friends." It sounded like a letter because, in effect, it was one. Delegation came later, and under David the company kept the personal register alive in other forms, including handwritten replies to customers whose questions the catalog didn't answer.
Tactic: As long as your company's primary customer-facing document shapes buying decisions, write the core of it yourself, from your own direct observation of the product in use.
Principle 6
Replace instructions with evidence
The seed catalogs of Burpee's era were thick with cultural instructions: how to sow, thin, water, and harvest. Burpee cut much of that and replaced it with testimonial letters and plant descriptions. In 1891 he became the first to use engravings made from photographs; within a decade, hand-drawn fantasies had largely vanished from the industry.
Both moves follow the same logic. Instructions put the burden of success on the customer: here is how you might make this work. Testimonials and photographs relocate the burden onto the product: here is proof that it already has. A photograph of a real cabbage disciplines the seller as much as it persuades the buyer, because the claim becomes checkable. That is exactly why it works.
B
The Seed House, Before and After Burpee
How Burpee's choices broke with the conventions of the trade.
| Domain | Trade convention | Burpee's approach |
|---|---|---|
| Product | Landowners sell surplus of their own crops; European varieties imported. | Varieties bred and selected for American conditions. |
| Proof | Trust the grower's word. | Every lot grown out in company trials; failing crops rejected entire. |
| Marketing | Hand-drawn illustrations; cultural instructions. | Photo-based engravings; testimonials; founder-written copy. |
| Distribution | Local stores and regional dealers. | Direct mail to homes, riding free and rural delivery. |
| Risk | Customer bears the cost of failed seed. | Replacement guarantee for up to a year. |
Tactic: Wherever your marketing tells customers how to succeed, test whether you could instead show them, with checkable evidence, that others already have.
Principle 7
Ride infrastructure someone else is building
The single most important enabling condition of Burpee's business was not of his making. Free city delivery arrived in 1863; free rural delivery began in 1896. Between them, the federal government built a network that would carry a lightweight envelope to almost any American household. Burpee's product, small, dry, durable seed, happened to be almost perfectly suited to that network, and his business model, the catalog, was designed to exploit it.
The lesson is not merely "use the new channel." It is that he was already operating at scale in the channel before its expansion to the countryside, which meant that when rural delivery arrived, his catalog was there to fill the new mailboxes. The pattern recurred in 2020, when a nation confined to its homes rediscovered mail order and Burpee had its biggest seed season in 144 years. The company's current owner and others have reached, unsurprisingly, for the comparison to the internet.
Tactic: Identify the public or platform infrastructure that is still being built out, and position your product so that it is already the obvious thing to send through it when the buildout reaches your customers.
Principle 8
Make the slogan an engineering spec
Burpee's Seeds Grow is a claim so minimal it almost sounds like a joke. Its power lies in what was built behind it. Seed grown under contract around the world, two and three years ahead; crops monitored and reported on; whole crops rejected if they fell short of the "Burpee Standard"; a sample of every lot grown out in company trials before packing; stock numbers tracing every lot through the warehouse; every order checked twice; and, wrapping it all, a guarantee to replace seed for up to a year.
The slogan was, functionally, a product specification published to the customer. Every operational system existed to make it true. That is the inversion most companies miss: they write a tagline that describes an aspiration, and then treat it as marketing. Burpee wrote a tagline describing a minimum, and then treated it as engineering. His own word for it, set in capitals in his final letter, was RELIABILITY, and he chose it over handsomeness and speed explicitly.
Tactic: Reduce your brand promise to the single most basic guarantee your customer cares about, then audit every operational step for whether it can break that promise, and fix those first.
Principle 9
Pay your customers to build your brand
The company's most famous slogan was not written by its founder. It came out of an 1890 competition in which Burpee offered cash prizes for the best advertisements. His manual on root crops was "compiled from the prize essays." Under David, the method expanded: the 1924 "What Burpee's Seeds Have Done for Me" contest drew thousands of letters; the 1926 zinnia contest ran through a Philadelphia radio station; the 1954 white-marigold prize ran for twenty-one years and drew 8,200 entries in its final round alone.
Contests did several things at once. They produced marketing assets (slogans, testimonials, photographs) more credible than anything the company could write about itself. They generated a stream of customer data and correspondence that the founder preserved obsessively. And they converted buyers into participants with a stake in the brand's story. Alice Vonk's two decades of seed-saving made her, in effect, a Burpee breeder who was never on the payroll.
Tactic: Design open, prize-backed challenges that ask customers to produce the proof, language, or innovation you need, and keep everything they send you.
Principle 10
Buy the discovery, then fix the story
Burpee did not breed Golden Bantam; William Chambers grew it, and a friend sold the seed after Chambers died. Burpee did not discover the cutworm-resistant bean; Asa Palmer did. Burpee's genius was in recognizing the value of the discovery, acquiring it, developing it, and then solving the problem that stood between the product and the market.
With Golden Bantam that problem was not agronomic but cultural. For two years nobody bought it, because yellow corn was "hog feed." The fix was a story: Looks like butter, tastes like butter, a line that reframed the stigmatized trait (the color) as the selling point. Product quality was necessary and insufficient. A superior product carrying an inferior story will lose to an inferior product with the right one, until someone rewrites the story.
Tactic: When a genuinely better product isn't selling, look for the specific belief that makes customers dismiss it, and write a phrase that turns the dismissed trait into the reason to buy.
Principle 11
Represent the trade, not just the firm
By 1893, fifteen years after formally founding his company, Burpee was president of the American Seed Trade Association. In the Progressive Era, as Washington expanded its regulation of private enterprise, he joined trade associations, corresponded with political figures, and traveled to the capital to represent the seed industry's interests. His son would later register as a lobbyist, albeit for the marigold.
The strategic logic is that a market leader's interests and an industry's interests converge on most regulatory questions, and that the leader who speaks for the whole trade shapes its rules with more legitimacy than one who speaks only for himself. Leadership of the trade association also gave Burpee a vantage point on competitors, suppliers, and policy that no catalog could provide.
Tactic: Once you lead your category, take on formal responsibility for representing the whole industry, because the rules written for everyone will be written partly by whoever shows up.
Principle 12
Never sell the engine with the name
The decades after David's 1970 sale are a controlled experiment in what happens when a brand changes hands without its operating logic. General Foods and ITT owned the name, the customer list, the catalog. What drifted away was everything that had made the name mean something: the sales force, absorbed into Scott; the stability of ownership, which Park Seed's chairman identified as the core problem; and, in 1981, the experimental work at Fordhook itself. Within a few years the retail customer list had halved.
Every successful recovery since has involved reconnecting the name to its engine. Bales and Barron restored a sales force and a horticultural advisory panel. George Ball, a breeder by training, reapplied research discipline to customer needs, then nearly broke the company by stretching the name into furniture and travel books, businesses with no proof ground at all, before retreating to seeds. His purchase of Fordhook in 1998 is the most symbolically legible decision in the whole post-family history.
S
Stewards of the Name
Who held Burpee, and what they did with the engine.
1876
Atlee Burpee, 18, starts a mail-order poultry business with $1,000 from his mother.
1888
Fordhook Farm purchased; becomes the company's proof ground.
1915
Atlee dies; David, 22, takes over the largest seed company in the world.
1970
David sells to General Foods for $10 million.
1979
ITT acquires the company and pairs it with O.M. Scott & Sons.
1981
Experimentation and seed production leave Fordhook.
1987
Bales and Barron buy Burpee in a $15 million leveraged buyout.
1991
George J. Ball, Inc. acquires Burpee; George Ball Jr. becomes CEO.
1998
Ball buys Fordhook Farm to restore it as a horticultural center.
2001
Bankruptcy after overexpansion; company refocuses on seed.
2020
Record seed sales as pandemic lockdowns revive home gardening.
Tactic: Before you sell, acquire, or extend a brand, identify the specific operational system that makes the name trustworthy, and treat any deal that separates the two as a liquidation of the name's value.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— W. Atlee Burpee, Fortieth Anniversary Supplement, 1876–1916A boy of 18 who was thrilled with the wonders of the Centennial Exhibition, full of enthusiasm, he was just beginning to appreciate that working with the soil is the biggest work that can be done.
— W. Atlee Burpee, Fortieth Anniversary Supplement, 1876–1916Of course, he wanted to produce and send out to his customers as good seeds as could be got, but no seed is as good as it should be until it is reliable.
— W. Atlee Burpee, Fortieth Anniversary Supplement, 1876–1916It has meant a good deal of work, a good many disappointments and failures—this forty years of working up to our present standard—and we have not yet reached our aim. Progress is still our watchword.
— David Burpee, as quoted in The New York Times, June 26, 1980If you want to be happy for an hour, get drunk. If you want to be happy for a weekend, get married. If you want to be happy for a whole week, kill your pig and eat it. But if you want to be happy all your life, become a gardener.
Maxims
- Let the work arrive before you do. Authority built on paper, with specifics, survives the moment someone discovers how young you are.
- Follow the request, keep the old shelf. Pivot toward what customers ask for without evicting the customers who got you there.
- Look for the misfits. What fails in one environment may be exactly what thrives in yours.
- Test before you take the money. A company that grows its product on its own ground first can sell certainty instead of hope.
- The founder's pen is a strategic asset. Delegate it late, and only to someone who has stood in the field.
- Show, don't instruct. Evidence of success sells more than directions for achieving it.
- Build the guarantee into the warehouse. A slogan is only as good as the systems that make it true ten thousand times a day.
- Your customers can write better copy than you can. Pay them to, and keep every letter.
- A great product with the wrong story is hog feed. Change the story, not the corn.
- The name is the harvest; the proof ground is the seed. Sell the first without the second and the name stops growing.
