Growing up in Seattle I spent summer evenings like this picking blackberries. These days I spend more time trying to fend off blackberry vines in my garden. If you’ve tried to do that, you’ve probably found that following one long blackberry vine to the source leads to another heading a different direction. Kind of like the story I’m about to tell you, the answer to a Local Wonder question: “Where did our Himalayan blackberries originate?” It was the end of the 19th century, and American life was changing dramatically.

People were moving from rural areas to towns and cities – including Seattle. Industrialization was creating a new middle class. Down the coast in Santa Rosa, California, an eccentric guy named Luther Burbank was hard at work on his experimental farm. Recipe! The best blackberry pie you will ever eat ever Burbank didn’t have any formal training, but he was working feverishly to breed strange and wonderful new kinds of plants. “He realizes the growing middle class is going to want to have fresh fruits and vegetables,” said Phillip Thurtle, who teaches in the University of Washington’s Comparative History of Ideas program.

“They’re not going to want to eat canned beans. They’re going to want to eat fresh beans all the time. But in order to do that, they’re going to have to be able to be shipped.” Local Wonder: Is Seattle Freeze a real thing? Thurtle said Burbank set out to create new varieties of fruits and vegetables that would be delicious and prolific – and that could withstand the voyage on the nation’s new transcontinental railroad. Burbank sold his hundreds of plant creations through catalogs with pictures of shiny fruit and shinier superlatives. He created the earliest of all large cherries, which he named the “Burbank.” Burbank’s inventions could also be weird – like a spineless cactus.

Or his potato-tomato hybrid, which somehow never took off. But others were smash hits. Like the freestone peach and elephant garlic. “My favorite example is the Shasta daisy, because this is something that most of us have in our gardens,” Thurtle said. Local Wonder: Where do Seattle-area crows go at night? If you’ve had fries at McDonald’s, you’ve likely eaten a relative of a Burbank creation. A potato Burbank invented in the 1870s, called the Burbank, later mutated into a potato called the Russet Burbank. It's the most widely-grown potato in America today. Thurtle said that Burbank was also working on another large-scale project – the thornless blackberry.

“Kind of the parallel to his spineless cactus or his stoneless plum,” he said. “He wanted to take the rough spots out of nature. To domesticate it for middle-class lives.” Burbank traded seeds with fellow collectors all around the world. In a package from India, he found seeds for a huge blackberry with an even bigger flavor. Burbank named it the Himalaya Giant (even though it’s actually believed to be from Armenia). Burbank found that the Himalaya Giant grew like nobody’s business – but only in temperate areas, like the Pacific Coast. Top read: There are worms in the blackberries you just picked