Burpee Seeds and Plants, officially W. Atlee Burpee & Co., is an American seed and plant company that was founded by Washington Atlee Burpee in Pennsylvania in 1876. In 1919, David Burpee began working to hybridize the marigold to overcome its limited colors, scrawniness, and late blooming flowers. It was at this time that he first had the idea of a white marigold competition but held off on it due to his belief that the hybridization would be unsuccessful. In its 1954 catalog, W. Atlee Burpee & Co. first advertised a competition for the development of the first white marigold flower, offering $10,000 to any gardener whose efforts produced a flower deemed to be pure white. Twenty-one years later, in 1975, the prize was awarded to 67-year-old Alice Vonk of Sully, Iowa, who received $100 the previous year as one of six gardeners nationwide whose marigolds came closest to being white. Vonk kept seeds from the lightest flowers in her garden each season, replanting for over two decades before achieving a pure white marigold that measured 2.5 inches in diameter. Her entry in the 1975 edition of the contest topped 8,200 other entrants and produced what was then described as the "costliest flower ever". Burpee's branded the flower as "Burpee's Best Whites." More information...
According to PR-model, burpee.com is ranked 86,486th in multilingual Wikipedia, in particular this website is ranked 49,018th in English Wikipedia.
The website is placed before sarantakos.wordpress.com and after erogamescape.dyndns.org in the BestRef global ranking of the most important sources of Wikipedia.
