Preface. Botanist David Fairchild is one of the reasons the average grocery store has 39,500 items. Before he came along, most people ate just a few kinds of food day in day out (though that was partly due to a lack of refrigeration).
I have longed to eat a mangosteen ever since I read this book, Fairchild’s favorite fruit, with mango a close second. But no luck so far.
What wonderful and often adventurous work Fairchild and other botanists had traveling all over the world in search of new crops American farmers could grow. Grains that could grow in colder climates were sought out.
Since 80 to 90% of future generations will be farmers after fossil fuels are gone, who will be growing food organically since fertilizer and pesticides are made from natural gas and oil, it would be wise for them to plant as many varieties of crops as possible not only for gourmet meals, but biodiversity, pest control, and a higher quality of life.
As usual, what follows are Kindle notes, this isn’t a proper book review.
Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com author of “Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy”, 2021, Springer; “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer; Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report
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Amanda Harris. 2015. Fruits of Eden: David Fairchild and Americas Plant Hunters. University Press of Florida.
At the end of the 19th century, most food in America was bland and brown. The typical family ate pretty much the same dishes every day. Their standard fare included beefsteaks smothered in onions, ham with rank-smelling cabbage, or maybe mushy macaroni coated in cheese. Since refrigeration didn’t exist, ingredients were limited to crops raised in the backyard or on a nearby farm. Corn and wheat, cows and pigs dominated American agriculture and American kitchens.
Fairchild transformed American meals by introducing foods from other countries. His campaign began as a New Year’s Resolution for 1897 and continued for more than 30 years, despite difficult periods of xenophobia at home and international warfare abroad. After he persuaded the United States Department of Agriculture to sponsor his project, he sent other smart, curious botanists to Asia, Africa, South America, and Europe to find new foods and plants. They explored remote jungles, desert oases, and mountain valleys and shipped their discoveries to government gardeners for testing across America. Collectively, the plant explorers introduced more than 58,000 items.
Many of their discoveries have been used as breeding material to improve existing plants, and others have become staples of the American table like mangoes, avocados, soybeans, figs, dates, and Meyer lemons.
Fairchild arrived in the nation’s capital on July 25, 1889, four months after the inauguration of Benjamin Harrison, a Republican from Indiana. The United States totaled 38, although four new ones— North Dakota, Washington, South Dakota, and Montana—would be added in November 1889. The country’s population was a little more than 50 million. Farming was an enormously important segment of the economy: the market value of agricultural products was more than $500 million (more than $12.5 billion in current dollars). Young scientists working to improve agriculture were as valuable to the nation as rocket scientists would be 75 years later.
Despite the national importance of farming, the U.S. Department of Agriculture had become a cabinet-level agency—one of seven—only a few months earlier. For decades, presidents had considered creating a separate office to help farmers, but many legislators, especially southerners, vehemently opposed granting the federal government any official role in the family farm, a fiercely independent American institution. Congress had finally established the office in 1862 only because the southern states had seceded, leaving northern senators and representatives free to approve the legislation without opposition.
After the Civil War ended, his uncle Thomas Barbour Bryan built Graceland Cemetery, a significant urban development that was the city’s first landscaped burial ground. He hired his nephew, Bryan Lathrop, to manage the cemetery, a job he apparently did well. Creating Graceland would probably have remained the family’s biggest accomplishment if not for the Great Chicago Fire of Sunday, October 8, 1871, a day that created one of the biggest real estate investment opportunities in American history. The fire triggered a chain of events that transformed urban architecture and, in the process, produced the personal fortune that bankrolled America’s first plant expeditions.
After Fairchild arrived in Naples he immediately recognized how unexciting American meals had been. “No sooner had I landed in Italy that I began to get a perspective on the limited number of foods which the fare in my home and in American boarding houses had brought to my palate,” he wrote later. His education began in a small restaurant where he usually ate lunch. There he sampled his first foreign food: a dried fig, a wickedly sweet morsel for a young man raised on boiled vegetables. He tried vermicelli with a sauce of tomatoes, a fruit whose possibly poisonous qualities were still being debated in America. He enjoyed Italian pasta so much—it was chewy and flavorful, not the mushy kind made with soft American wheat—that he collected 52 shapes and mailed them to friends in Washington.
As he rushed away from Corsica Fairchild stole a few cuttings from citron trees along a road and hid them under his coat. Unequipped with material to protect the branches from drying out on the long voyage between Italy and America, he jammed the sticks into raw potatoes, packaged the lot and mailed them. The potatoes provided enough moisture to nourish the cuttings, which survived the trip to Washington. Officials sent the twigs to California, where they launched a profitable business.
At the end of 1895, Fairchild went to Java. The ship landed on the west coast of Sumatra at the village of Padang, a collection of low buildings strung along the waterfront and backed by thick jungle. Fairchild was finally in the South Seas, on the verge of seeing the world he had dreamed about in Kansas. He never forgot the thrill of his first visit. “The memory of that first tropical night on shore and of the noise of the myriads of insects and the smell of the vegetation and the sensation of being close to wild jungles and wild people sometimes comes back to me even though millions of later experiences have left their traces on my brain.”
The Visitors’ Laboratory at the botanical garden in Buitenzorg, a city now called Bogor, was, like the Zoological States in Naples, an unusual spot where botanists from around the world worked together. This spirit of shared scientific inquiry among researchers of all nationalities and all specialties stayed with Fairchild for the rest of his life.
“The institution was to discover and bring to light a knowledge of the plant life of the tropical world,” Fairchild wrote later. “Not for the uses of Holland and Netherlands India alone, but for the whole world of plants—a world which knows no national boundaries, a world which constitutes a vast, magnificent realm of living stuff destined to be of interest to the human race for all time.”
Most remarkable were the unfamiliar, even bizarre tropical fruits. It was in Java, in the summer of 1896, that David Fairchild began his lifelong love affair with one food: the mangosteen. Four years later he launched a lifelong but ultimately unsuccessful push to cultivate them in America. His enthusiasm mirrored the fascination of Queen Victoria, who in 1855 allegedly promised to pay 100 pounds to the first person to bring her a single mangosteen.
After this Fairchild went to Sumatra, and after landing toured the public market in a settlement called Pandang. It was a noisy, crowded place that offered a cornucopia of strange cultivated fruits and vegetables. Fairchild was immediately intrigued. The visit “showed me how many new and interesting food plants there were if only we had an established place where they could be sent,” he wrote.
Fairchild’s wealthy supporter, Lathrop, proposed that these strange, foreign plants be sent to America to see which ones take root, produce fruit, and make money for farmers and merchants. At the time, only about 2% of the world’s edible plants were cultivated in America, and the typical farmer grew only about twenty of them. Lathrop wanted Americans to open their mouths to new foods.
“He began to lay before me his idea of what a botanist could do if he were given the opportunity to travel and collect the native vegetables, fruits, drug plants, grains and all the other types of useful plants as yet unknown in America,” Fairchild wrote later. It was a long evening of lively debate, and in the end, Lathrop won. Fairchild agreed to join his project. He would abandon his cloistered studies in Java and take up the mission of foreign plant introduction. As the clock approached midnight, David Fairchild promised Barbour Lathrop that he would spend his life searching the globe for new foods. “Without Barbour Lathrop to goad him into an entirely different life work,” Douglas wrote later, “to pay his salary and his expenses on their long wanderings, David Fairchild might have become a quiet, little-known if distinguished plant pathologist and entomologist, a scientist-scholar whose life might have been lived almost entirely within the walls of some laboratory.
“The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture,” Jefferson wrote in 1800, a remark that later American plant explorers frequently quoted with pride. Jefferson had followed his own advice: he once smuggled grains of rice from Italy to Virginia in his coat pocket even though Italian officials could have executed him if he had been caught.
When Fairchild and Lathrop began the adventures that would change America’s eating habits, they looked like improbable companions. Lathrop was tall, slim, and always well dressed; in bearing he resembled the military men he admired. He carried a cane and wore a hat wherever he went. Fairchild, in contrast, was gawky and uncertain and rarely wore clothes appropriate to the occasion, whatever it was. Lathrop was demanding and critical; Fairchild was constantly frazzled. In the beginning Lathrop, who had flashing dark blue eyes and expressive bushy eyebrows, called Fairchild “my investment,” with a little bit of a sneer. Fairchild, fully aware of the contrast, felt inadequate. “Somehow I could not do anything quite to suit him,” he admitted. Fairchild was so socially awkward that he agreed to one condition of working with Lathrop: he promised not to get married while he was exploring for plants.
Their expedition began immediately with a leisurely cruise to Singapore and Siam. A few days later when he and Lathrop attended a young couple’s wedding dinner. It was a special occasion because the Crown Prince of Siam also attended the feast. Fairchild found the food unfamiliar and the formal etiquette bizarre. “During the 13-course dinner, every dish was strange to us except the rice,” he wrote later. “Each course was noiselessly placed on the table by a servant deferentially crawling on his knees. Not a person stood or walked erect while the prince and his guests were at the table. At the close of the long meal, the wives appeared and even those of royal birth all hitched themselves across the floor like a child who has not yet learned to creep.” As witnesses to the wedding ceremony, Fairchild and Lathrop were obliged by local custom to trickle perfumed water down the bride and groom’s necks as the couple knelt together with their foreheads touching. “If the others poured as much water from the jeweled conch shell as I did,” he wrote later, “the poor bride and groom must have been well soaked.
The two had a clear plan. First of all, they were only interested in new foods and other useful plants, nothing ornamental or impractical. Also, they needed trained botanists to do the hunting so the government wouldn’t be inundated with worthless material. Next, they wanted experiment gardens prepared to test the foreign plants. Finally, Swingle and Fairchild proposed, the whole operation could be funded by quietly diverting $20,000 (equal to about $500,000 today) from another line in the agriculture department’s budget. It was an audacious scheme from two junior botanists. But by then Fairchild had grown more confident.
Fairchild and Swingle were apprehensive when they entered their new boss’s office at the end of August 1897 even though they had arranged for a senior department employee to go with them to give their idea more credibility. “Secretary Wilson was a tall, gaunt man with a gray beard and deep-set eyes,” Fairchild remembered. “He sat listening to us with his eyes half closed and, at intervals, made use of the nearby spittoon. … I waited breathlessly for his verdict.
Wilson named it “the section of foreign seed and plant introduction”. No modern government had employed its own team of full-time plant explorers. In England and France, large private companies had sponsored many foreign plant expeditions to increase their profits by selling rare plants, usually showy ornamentals. These private firms were fiercely competitive and proprietary about their discoveries, but the U.S. government would be eager to share its findings with the public and let farmers make money.
Lathrop suddenly arrived in person as Fairchild was engaged in his valuable but sedentary work. Wasting no time, Lathrop tempted him with the offer of another exciting trip to faraway lands, one that would be longer and more interesting than their six-month cruise through the South Seas. When Fairchild protested that he had just started his new job, Lathrop argued that he was too inexperienced to supervise international plant collectors. If the government’s scheme were to succeed, Lathrop insisted, Fairchild couldn’t depend on strangers to send the material he wanted. He needed to visit the places himself and make important contacts with botanists, gardeners, and government officials
The two-year trip Lathrop had promised turned into a five-year odyssey. It was a remarkable adventure of luxury travel experiences, punctuated by meetings with prominent horticulturalists—few were lowly enough to be called gardeners—and casual, dreamlike botanizing sessions on remote islands.
His visit to Maine in the summer of 1898 was brief. Because Lathrop was paying the bills, traveling was always conducted on his terms: expensive, comfortable, quick, and not always in a straight line. The zigzagging began immediately after the two men left Maine for California where Fairchild met Luther Burbank, America’s first celebrity nurseryman. Burbank had caused great excitement in horticultural circles by inventing startling new varieties of fruits, vegetables, and flowers in these years before scientists understood the science of plant breeding
Trinidad, Jamaica, and Barbados received a little more attention. In Kingston, Fairchild first tasted chayote, a mild-flavored squash that he later tried hard to persuade Americans to appreciate. Fairchild collected 16 varieties of yams and four kinds of sweet potatoes, nutritious stables in the Caribbean diet.
Throughout South America, Fairchild hunted for plants the easiest way possible: he bought them in local markets and took cuttings from plants in botanical gardens. At this point in his travels everything was so new and Fairchild’s interests were so broad that he randomly collected samples of almost everything that was unfamiliar.
He shipped large batches to Washington, often without providing information or advice for the people who were supposed to test the plants. By July 1899 the department had received more than 200 samples of Latin American beans, peppers, squashes, melons, peas, apples, and other fruits and vegetables. Fairchild’s most successful discovery during the first part of the expedition was an alfalfa from Lima, Peru, that eventually flourished as a forage plant in Arizona known as the “Hairy Peruvian”.
In Chile he bought a bushel of avocado seeds that wound up in California; they produced one of the earliest varieties grown there. Many foods Fairchild collected failed; he admitted that a large percentage of the plants he shipped were lost before they got a chance to grow in America.
The men were constantly exposed to illness. When they arrived in Panama in February 1899, a few years after yellow fever had forced French engineers to abort construction of the canal there, Panama was considered the most dangerous place in South America. Death was so common that all hospital patients were fitted for coffins when they were admitted for treatment.
These secret shipments included broccoli, then virtually unknown in America. In Venice Fairchild also discovered zucchini—identified as “vegetable marrow”—for sale in a market.
Before he arrived in Egypt he said he knew the word sesame only as Ali Baba’s famous password; afterward he understood it to be a source of valuable cooking oil. He also collected chickpeas, okra, strawberry spinach, and more hot peppers.
Lathrop encouraged Fairchild to buy as much cotton as possible. He shipped six bushels of seeds of three varieties, material that eventually boosted the lucrative cotton industries in Arizona and California.
Banda was an important source of nutmeg, an especially handsome plant. “There are few fruit trees more beautiful than nutmeg trees with their glossy leaves and pear-shaped, straw-colored fruits,” he recalled. “As the fruits ripen, they crack open and show the brilliant crimson mace which covers the seed or nutmeg with a thin, waxy covering. The vivid color of the fruit and the deep green foliage make the trees among the most dramatic and colorful of the tropical plant world.” Fairchild, who rarely passed up an opportunity to stroll alone among trees, spent hours wandering through nutmeg groves.
In May 1900, Fairchild visited Scandinavia to collect examples of tough-weather fruits and fodder plants.
the Chinese treated Fairchild well and he had time to introduce himself to John M. Swan, a doctor at a missionary hospital in Canton who helped him collect dozens of peaches, plums, persimmons, and other fruits. Swan also told him how to find the seeds that produce tung oil, the glossy material used to waterproof the exterior of Chinese junks.
Fairchild was able to visit rural areas outside Canton and wander among the small vegetable plots there. “These truck gardens of a city of 2,000,000 people did not contain a single vegetable with which we are familiar in America.
He watched Chinese farmers control pests the old-fashioned way: they picked off each insect on every plant by hand.
By the time Fairchild finished this two-month detour to the Persian Gulf he had collected 224 date palm offshoots or suckers, each weighing about thirty pounds.
After he arranged to send almost four tons of trees to Washington, Fairchild retraced his route and joined Lathrop in Japan in the summer of 1902. They lived comfortably at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo where Lathrop relaxed and Fairchild searched for plants. He bought fruits and vegetables at public markets and discovered zoysia, a plant that eventually became a popular ground cover in America. At Lathrop’s insistence he also bought bamboo plants, a purchase that triggered Fairchild’s long love affair with this huge grass.
Japanese flowering cherry trees remained one of Fairchild’s passions.
During his travels with Lathrop, Fairchild constantly hunted for varieties of one particular food, the mango. It was his second favorite fruit after the mangosteen, which, despite its name, is not related.
It was Elbridge Gale’s determination and defiance of conventional, wrong-headed wisdom that inspired Fairchild to search for mangos all over the world. During the four years he spent traveling alone and with Lathrop, Fairchild sent 24 varieties from six countries, each supposedly tastier or hardier than the other.
Hansen, who emigrated from Denmark when he was seven years old, was a young plant breeder who worked in the northern plains, the region that Wilson was trying hardest to help. Hansen had done some traveling before Wilson hired him in spring 1897, having visited Russia and seven other countries for four months in 1894 while he was a student at Iowa State College and Wilson ran the plant experiment station there. Hansen also had another, more important qualification for the job. Unlike many other horticulturalists at the time, he was a plant breeder who understood that it was botanically impossible to acclimate plants to tolerate severe conditions; only cross breeding with proven hardy varieties could produce tough plants. Because Hansen possessed this scientific sophistication, Wilson trusted him to know what to look for in the field.
Hansen was thirty-one in 1897 when Wilson convinced him that the future of American agriculture depended on his returning to Russia to find material that could be introduced in the Dakotas, then a dry, unproductive region where few crops grew. The mission was haphazard and dangerous. Wilson paid him $3,000, a generous salary equal to about $78,000 in current dollars. Shortly after Hansen arrived in Uzbek province in Turkistan in November 1897, a field of alfalfa with small blue flowers attracted his attention. He believed the plant would survive in South Dakota, where temperatures range from 50 degrees below zero to 114 degrees above, to provide year-round feed for livestock, as well as produce nitrogen to enrich the soil. Before he could recommend the plant to Secretary Wilson, however, he needed to figure out how far north the blue alfalfa grew.
On Christmas 1897 he reached Kopal in southwestern Siberia, a town on the same latitude as South Dakota, where the blue Turkistan alfalfa was still growing. Confident it could thrive on the northern plains, he sent thousands of seeds to Washington. (Years later he returned and discovered a hardier type, an alfalfa with tiny yellow flowers, and brought that one to America, too. As a lasting tribute to Hansen’s work, South Dakota State University selected blue and yellow as its school colors.)
At first the parcels trickled in from Russia; soon, however, hundreds of packages arrived in a deluge. One day in February 1898, twelve tons of seeds of a fodder plant called smooth brome grass from the Volga River district turned up. Fairchild struggled to keep the shipments straight and check for dangerous insects or diseases that might have accompanied the material. The department had organized a system of public and private experiment gardens to test the material, so Fairchild arranged the seeds into 5,000 small packages and shipped them around the country. The enormous workload made him miserable. Fairchild, who hated clerical tasks, soon decided that he would rather be exploring himself. Again he was unhappy. “Hansen felt that he had been sent out to collect, and he collected everything and collected it in quantity,” Fairchild recalled. Later in an unpublished essay his criticism was harsher: “Hansen’s collections took on the character of a nightmare.” Nonetheless, Hansen had Secretary Wilson’s support, and Wilson sent him on two more trips to Russia. Fairchild, who may have been jealous of Hansen’s close relationship with his boss, accused Plant Explorer Number One of keeping bad records, overspending, and—perhaps an explorer’s biggest sin—passing off plants he bought in a market as material he found in the wild.
The department’s second staff explorer, who was hired in July 1898, earned Fairchild’s great respect. He was Mark Alfred Carleton, Fairchild’s classmate at Kansas State Agricultural College, who had become a cereal specialist for the department after graduation. Carleton’s great passion was to improve the grains cultivated in America’s wheat belt. Born in Ohio and raised on a farm in Kansas, Carleton spent his childhood and youth watching his neighbors labor constantly to harvest good wheat. Most wheat cultivated in America at this time was a red or white winter variety with soft kernels high in starch and low in protein. America’s earliest settlers had planted it east of the Mississippi River and ground it into flour to make bread and pastry.
As pioneers moved west early in the nineteenth century, they brought seeds of these soft wheats with them, unaware that the varieties couldn’t handle the different growing conditions west of the Mississippi. Midwestern winters are too cold and summers are too hot and dry for most soft wheats. In the prairie fields of Kansas, Carleton learned, they were especially vulnerable to rust, a fungus that shrivels the grain and rots the straw.
Carleton had also learned, however, that not all farmers in Kansas had this problem. The exceptions were Mennonites who had arrived from Russia in 1873. America was the most recent home for these Protestants, who had wandered through Europe for generations. The sect had originally lived in West Prussia, but many members moved to southern Russia about 1770 when Catherine the Great convinced them to settle remote sections of her country in exchange for one hundred years of special privileges, including exemption from military service. The Mennonites were skilled farmers who thrived in the Crimea by developing through trial and error hard wheat varieties that could handle the tough climate there.
In the mid-1800s, as Catherine’s century of protection drew to an end, the Russian government warned the Mennonites that they would soon face conscription despite their pacifist convictions. Many in the community fled Russia and sought religious freedom in the New World.
After exploring for six months, Carleton returned to Washington with several types of wheat, including the hardest of all—durum, often known as macaroni wheat.
While midwestern farmers were pleased with Carleton’s seeds, midwestern millers were not. They didn’t want the trouble and expense of updating their machinery to process harder grains. “Durum, the hardest of hard wheats, met at once with the most violent opposition, chiefly from millers, but also from all grain men,” Carleton wrote later. “Various epithets, such as ‘bastard’ and ‘goose,’ were applied to the wheat without restriction.
Carleton’s promotional campaign worked. Within a few years, large grain processors relented and modified their mills to grind hard wheat into flour. Carleton’s trip cost the U.S. government about $10,000 (about $250,000 today); by 1905 the new crop was worth $10 million a year (more than $250 million today)—a 1,000 percent increase. America had so much durum wheat that the country exported 6 million bushels a year. By 2011 production rose to about 50 million bushels a year. Because of Mark Carleton, American farmers had more than enough wheat, freeing experts at the end of the nineteenth century to worry about something other than widespread famine.
Americans consumed rice primarily as a pudding, not—like most people in the world—as part of a meal’s main course. Americans demanded kernels with a clean, smooth texture. Farmers in Louisiana and Texas grew mostly long-grain varieties originally imported from Honduras, but the kernel’s length made the rice fragile. When the outer coating was polished to whiten the grains, the only kind most Americans would eat, the rice often shattered. To make the product pretty and smooth enough to attract shoppers, processors coated it with paraffin wax. Of course, this beauty came with a price; buffing removed rice’s nutrients and wax removed its taste.
America’s rice-eating habits appalled Fairchild. “Rice is the greatest food staple in the world, more people living on it than on any other, and yet Americans know so little about it that they are actually throwing away the best part of the grains of rice and are eating only the tasteless, starchy, proteinless remainder,” he wrote in a magazine article. He mocked Americans for demanding rice as shiny as “glass beads.” “A pudding of stewed, sweetened rice, dusted with cinnamon is about as unappetizing to a fastidious Japanese as a sugar-coated beefsteak filled with raisins would be to an American,” Fairchild wrote.
Those glass beads were unhealthy as well. In 1908, a decade after Knapp’s trip, scientists determined that a diet of polished white rice could cause beriberi, a discovery that forced rice growers to enrich the grains with the nutrients removed by milling.
Fairchild had taken hundreds during his travels, and as he chatted with Grosvenor, he described one unforgettable scene he had captured. In May 1901 he had gone to North Africa to find date palms. When he landed in Tunis, he noticed an astonishing spectacle: strolling through town were young women wearing yards of brilliantly colored silk and tall pointed hats. Each woman weighed about 300 pounds. “I simply could not turn my eyes away from them,” Fairchild wrote later, “and frequently turned my Kodak toward them too, although they did not like it.”
Davidia involucrata is the most interesting and most beautiful of all trees which grow in the north temperate regions
That spring Meyer set off for Manchuria, his first long trip inside Asia. It was a remote but promising destination because Manchuria’s growing conditions were similar to those of the northern United States, the section of the country that Secretary Wilson wanted most to help. Problems plagued the trip from the beginning, however. Officials wouldn’t let Meyer travel freely because Russian and Japanese soldiers were still skirmishing in the region, a bitter after-effect of the Russo-Japanese War that had ended only seven months earlier. Notorious outlaws called the Hun-hutzes (Red Beards) also menaced the area. Despite these obstacles, Meyer, confident he would be safe, was determined to make the trip. He knew he could be physically intimidating, especially when he wore a heavy sheepskin coat, big boots, and a bearskin hat to survive temperatures that dropped to 30 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. With a revolver and a Bowie knife in his belt, Meyer was prepared to defend himself. He relished the adventure
He spent only three months in Manchuria, including side trips to northern Korea and Siberia. It was still a rough expedition: he covered 1,800 miles from Liaoyang to Vladivostock almost entirely on foot, averaging twenty miles a day for ninety days. He wore out three pairs of boots in three months. On the way he saw beautiful peonies growing wild and collected many specimens of useful plants, including one that eventually became enormously important to America: the soybean.
Meyer, recognizing that it was a mainstay of the Chinese diet, sent samples to Fairchild: he collected seeds, whole plants, even beans prepared as tofu, which he called cheese. During his travels Meyer shipped more than one hundred varieties—including ones that launched America’s vast soybean oil industry.
Meyer told de Vries that he had wanted to walk across Manchuria to Harbin, but the trip would have been too dangerous, so he took a train. Tigers, panthers, bears, and wolves lurked nearby, but Meyer said he was more afraid of humans than wild animals.
On March 31, 1908, as he was heading to Peking toward the end of his first expedition, Meyer stopped briefly in the small village of Fengtai. In a doorway he noticed something new. It was a small tree bearing about a dozen unusual fruits that looked like a cross between a lemon and an orange. Villagers told him that the strange plant was valuable; rich Chinese paid as much as ten dollars for each tree because it produced fruit all year. “The idea is to have as many fruits as possible on the smallest possible plant,” Meyer explained later. He sliced a thin branch off the tree with his Bowie knife and packed it carefully in damp moss. Meyer delivered it two months later to Fairchild. He gave the cutting an unexciting label—“Plant Introduction No. 23028”—and sent it to the department’s garden in Chico, California, to see if it would grow and, what was more important, produce fruit in America. The experiment lasted seven years, but eventually Fairchild was able to report that the cutting was a success. “Meyer’s dwarf lemon from Peking was producing a high yield,” he said. “It had begun to attract attention as a possible commercial lemon, even though its fruit flesh had an orange tint.
Six weeks after he spotted the lemon, Meyer boarded a ship in Shanghai for San Francisco. He carried twenty tons of trees, cuttings, seeds, and dried herbarium material as well as, almost as an afterthought, two rare monkeys for the National Zoo. “They cause me as much trouble as babies,” Meyer complained when he arrived in California in June 1908.
Roosevelt, who was battling with Congress over the need for tough conservation laws, wanted a firsthand account of the devastation of Wutaishan. The burly plant explorer, seated in a leather armchair in a large room decorated with moose heads and bearskin rugs, described deforestation in China to the president of the United States. “The Chinese peasants have no regard for the wild vegetation and they cut down and grub out every wild wood plant in their perpetual search for fuel,” Meyer explained
Four months later, in the leaflet he sent to Congress as his annual State of the Union message, Roosevelt quoted Meyer by name and included his photographs to illustrate the price America could pay if the nation didn’t protect its trees. Meyer’s pictures, Roosevelt told lawmakers, “show in vivid fashion the appalling desolation, taking the shape of barren mountains and gravel and sand-covered plains, which immediately follows and depends upon the deforestation of the mountains.
While Wilson was sidelined in the hospital, Paul and Homer Brett, a U.S. consul in Muscat, set off into the interior of the Arabian Peninsula to buy date palms. They traveled sixty miles through the desert under the sultan of Oman’s protection in a caravan of eleven of the sultan’s best camels, Wilson told his father. They were ambushed twice, yet they escaped unharmed each time. The assignment was not easy. The Popenoe brothers, who both had fair skin, light hair, and bright blue eyes, must have stood out dramatically in the Mideast. “As we passed through the bazaars [in Basra], merchants would spit on the ground and significantly draw their fingers across their throats,” Paul wrote later. “In Baghdad we were chased for a mile by a crowd throwing stones, and in one of the seaports of Persia a native suddenly took a shot at us with his rifle, which fortunately missed.” Despite the risks, they did not disappoint their father. The brothers bought 9,000 date palm offshoots in Baghdad and Basra and another 6,000 in Algeria and arranged to have the huge lot—each healthy offshoot stood about three feet tall and weighed thirty pounds—shipped across the Atlantic Ocean. The trees survived the voyage because Wilson Popenoe gave his portable typewriter to the ship’s captain in exchange for enough fresh water to keep the palms alive. During the last leg of the journey from Galveston, Texas, to California, the offshoots filled seventeen refrigerated railroad cars, a load so remarkable that newspapers reported the shipment in detail. Paul Popenoe’s separate journey home took long enough for him to write three hundred pages about date palms.
The trip’s primary purpose was to finish an assignment that Frank Meyer had started before he died: save the American chestnut tree. At the beginning of the 20th century, America’s native chestnuts thrived along the Eastern Seaboard. An estimated four billion trees—many as tall as 100 feet—covered about a quarter of the region’s forests. Chestnut wood was hard and straight and vital to serve the nation’s growing needs for railroad ties and telephone poles. But in 1904 a scientist at the Bronx Zoo in New York City noticed a canker or fungus spreading on the trees’ bark. Three years later the same disease was evident on chestnut trees growing across the street in the New York Botanical Garden. It was the beginning of the most significant invasion of a foreign plant disease in American history.
Fairchild’s last official day on the agriculture department’s staff was June 30, 1935. As of that date the office he established had introduced 111,857 varieties of seeds and plants to America.
“Many of the immigrants have their little day or hour and are never again heard from,” he wrote in the 1928 Yearbook of Agriculture. “Others sink out of sight for a time and later achieve great prominence.” He could have added that a few were out-and-out flops and others were impractical curiosities that Fairchild showed off to his friends and relatives. Yet many of David Fairchild’s plant immigrants were great successes of incalculable value. Mark Carleton’s durum wheat and Frank Meyer’s soybeans completely transformed American agriculture in the twentieth century. And by the beginning of the twenty-first century, Walter Swingle’s dates and figs and Wilson Popenoe’s avocados had become staples of the American diet. Meyer’s lemon was a food lovers’ delight. Many other introductions served the important but less visible role of providing essential breeding material to make existing plants hardier or more productive.
When David Fairchild left Washington in 1924, after giving up a job that kept him at a desk for most of 20 years, his weariness suddenly vanished. Overnight, it seems, he acquired enormous energy and enthusiasm that propelled him into a constant series of adventures that filled the rest of his life. “As the fieldmen used to say, DF had it made,” Ryerson said later. His first project took him back to the tropics. While he waited for Allison Armour to outfit his ship for the scientific expedition, Fairchild helped his friends William Morton Wheeler and Thomas Barbour, an entomologist and a zoologist associated with Harvard University, set up a new scientific research center on an island in Panama’s rain forest. Initially called the Barro Colorado Island Biological Laboratory (and now known as the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute), the facility was modeled after the botanical institutes Fairchild loved in Naples and Java.
In September 1924, David and Marian Fairchild—and sometimes their children and friends—began exploring for plants, often under Allison Armour’s sponsorship. They drove an old American car through Algeria and Morocco, visiting gardens, ancient cities, and souks. They especially enjoyed Mogador, then a drowsy little town on the sea that was home of the rare argan nut trees. Marian Fairchild showed off her firm feminist convictions by driving their Dodge sedan through Fez. “Marian takes every opportunity to run the car around through the narrow streets just to show that she is not in any way under her husband’s thumb,” Fairchild told Grosvenor on April 4, 1925.
Sumatra and nearby islands were full of fascinating, mysterious plants. In April 1926, Fairchild finally took Marian to Java, fulfilling a promise he had made when they married more than twenty years earlier. Soon after they arrived, they visited a penal colony off the coast of Java where they encountered an imprisoned headhunter. He “had failed to get as many heads as his sweetheart demanded before she would marry him,” Fairchild explained, “because the government stopped him and sent him here after his last murder.” He had only five; she wanted six.
The kepel, whose proper name is Stelechocarpus burahol, is related to the cherimoya and the pawpaw, both fruits Fairchild had promoted in America. Local guides told the Fairchilds that sultans had planted the trees and ordered their lovers to eat kepel fruit because it made their bodily fluids smell like violets. They also warned outsiders that stealing the fruit would bring bad luck. Fairchild immediately went to the open market in Djokjakarta to buy some for America. (Kepel was the 67,491st seed or plant to arrive in Washington from the ends of the earth. In 2012 the plant was growing at The Kampong in Coconut Grove.) At the age of 57, in a beautiful, rundown spot far away from home, Fairchild had discovered one of the world’s most romantic fruits.
Between trips he joined Marjory Douglas on Ernest F. Coe’s early campaign to save the Florida Everglades by becoming the first president of the Tropical Everglades Park Association and writing articles about the natural glories of the swamp. “The Everglades of South Florida have a strange and to me appealing beauty,” he said during a speech on February 28, 1929. “Their charm partakes of the charm of the Pacific Islands.” With the authority of a global traveler, he insisted that the Everglades’ natural beauty was unmatched anywhere in the world.
Fairchild’s many books and articles brought attention to his accomplishments and led to the establishment of the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables by Colonel Robert H. Montgomery, yet another wealthy philanthropist who loved nature—he collected trees, large ones—and was charmed by David Fairchild.
The project began by accident. One day in 1936 Montgomery, an accountant and business executive with a home in Florida, was playing bridge with Stanton Griffis, a New York investor and businessman. Griffis said he wanted some land near Miami, so Montgomery obligingly bought twenty-five acres for him. But Griffis backed out of the deal, leaving Montgomery with land he didn’t need. The situation gave Montgomery the opportunity to create a garden of palms. This palmetum soon expanded into the 83-acre site that is now the Fairchild Tropical Garden. The garden officially opened on March 23, 1938. Griffis became one of its first lifetime members. Montgomery and Fairchild’s love of palm trees led to Fairchild’s last big seagoing adventure.
Fairchild bought hundreds of mangosteens in the market at Penang and sent the seeds to Wilson Popenoe, who was setting up the Lancetilla Agricultural Experiment Station in Tela, Honduras.
Popenoe planted the seeds and waited. Mangosteens are difficult plants to grow for they need the right soil and climate and, most significantly, more time than commercial growers want to give them, especially in America. However, by 1944 the orchard had produced thirty tons of David Fairchild’s favorite fruit.
By the middle of 1954, Fairchild’s own health had deteriorated. He died at home in Coconut Grove on the afternoon of August 6, 1954. He was 85.