Edward James Wickson was born on August 3, 1848, in
Rochester, New York. He graduated from
Hamilton College, New York, in 1868 or 1869 Wickson was an advocate for the experimental horticulturist
Luther Burbank and wrote about him in
Luther Burbank; Man, Methods and Achievements, published in book form in 1902. They had both come to California in 1875, and they knew of each other very soon thereafter. By the 1880s, Wickson was praising Burbank's hybrids in the pages of
Pacific Rural Press, so much so that Burbank renamed his green Perfection
plum to the Wickson plum in 1894. Wickson is credited with being one of the two men (the other being former Stanford University president
David Starr Jordan) who helped created the legend of Burbank as one of the great self-taught leaders of modern agricultural science. Wickson is also said to be one of the half dozen authors who anonymously wrote the text for the 12-volume set
Luther Burbank: His Methods and Discoveries, published by the Luther Burbank Press in 1914–15. variety was subsequently rechristened the Wickson in honor of Edward J. Wickson. Its ancestors were the Kelsey and the Burbank. The Wickson plum remains available today, although modern cultivars range from red-skinned to green-skinned. In 1876, Wickson organized California's first dairy association, and in 1879 he became one of the organizers of the California State Horticultural Society. He was elected secretary of the horticultural society, a position he held for 15 years. At the founding of the California Floral Society in 1888, Wickson was chosen as its first president; when he stepped down, he retained the title of honorary president. In 1879, he joined the
University of California as a lecturer in practical agriculture, specializing in dairy husbandry. All told, he worked in the UC system for 33 years, rising from lecturer to assistant professor of agriculture (in 1891), associate professor of agriculture,
horticulture, and
entomology (in 1892), professor of agricultural practice (in 1897) and superintendent of the Agricultural Extension service (in 1898). In 1906 he succeeded
Eugene W. Hilgard as dean of the College of Agriculture, and he also became director of the Agricultural Experiment Station, holding both positions until his retirement in 1912. He was also an emeritus professor of horticulture from 1915 to 1923. In 1905–06, he helped to select the sites for what became the
University Farm at Davisville (now
Davis), the Southern California Pathological Laboratory at
Whittier, and the
Citrus Experiment Station at
Riverside. Throughout his career in both agricultural publishing and education, he retained a strong bias towards knowledge gained in the field over laboratory-oriented forms of training. At the same time, he and Hilgard are credited as halting determined efforts by the Grange and other agricultural interests that would have split the College of Agriculture off from the University of California system. From 1877 to 1906, he was a member (and later secretary and president) of the San Francisco Microscopical Society, an organization that championed the emerging use of
microscopy for scientific research. The society went defunct after its laboratory was destroyed in the
1906 earthquake. In 1913, Wickson spent six months in Europe as one of two California delegates on the American Commission to Study Agricultural Cooperation and Rural Credit in Europe. Around 1919, Wickson consulted with real estate developer J.C. Forkner (eventual founder of the
J.C. Forkner Fig Gardens) on the potential of
fig farming as a viable commercial enterprise in California. He died in
Berkeley, California, on July 17, 1923. His papers are held in the University of California, Davis, Special Collections. In 1969, the University of California, Berkeley, named an area of the campus around the north fork of Strawberry Creek as the Wickson Natural Area in his honor. This area contains the oldest stand of
coast redwoods on the Berkeley campus. ==Plant species named after Wickson==