Mrs. Vonk's Victory

Some problems--unlike the squaring of the circle or the conversion of the Chinese--do have a solution. So David Burpee, 82, has finally discovered. All his life, Burpee has been devoted to the task of making a better marigold. As chief of the W. Atlee Burpee mail-order seed company from 1915 to 1970, Burpee found ways to invent new varieties large and small, but his main quest was for a pure white marigold, one that could be cross-pollinated with existing yellow, orange, and rust varieties to create a rainbow of new colors. In 1954, Burpee made a public offer of $10,000 for seeds that would produce a white blossom at least 2 1/2 in. across. Amateur gardeners sent in thousands of entries, and the Burpee Co. spent $250,000 in testing them, in vain.

Then, last year, Alice Vonk, now 67, a widowed mother of eight from Sully, Iowa, sent in some seeds to Burpee's farm in California. The first crop of marigolds was not quite white, but its seeds were planted this year, yielding at last the winner. Mrs. Vonk, who picked up her check last week at Burpee's home in Doylestown, Pa., did it all without any highfalutin horticultural techniques. Every summer for the past 20 years, she simply picked out the flowers that came closest to the ideal and saved their seeds for replanting: "I put red strings on the flowers that looked good and green ones on those that looked pretty good." Adds Marigold Maven Burpee: "This wasn't just luck, it was persistence. She just did the right thing."

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