Edward J. Wickson

Edward James Wickson (August 3, 1848 – July 17, 1923) was an American agronomist and journalist who was a leader in agricultural education in California in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Edward was the son of George Guest and Kitty Ray Wickson, the grandson of James and Jane Tuesman Wickson, immigrants to Canada in 1834.

Biography 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.