Fruited Plains

When Thomas Jefferson arrived as the American minister to Paris in the 1780s to negotiate commercial treaties with the French and other European powers, he had in his luggage the manuscript of his Notes on the State of Virginia, information on native trees, the weights of American mammals and, for good measure, the pelt of a particularly enormous panther. These were his latest weapons in the battle for the independence of the United States, because Jefferson was intending to refute the French theory of the “degeneracy of America”. Noting how European grains, vegetables and fruits often grew quickly but then failed to mature in America, some French scientists insisted that people as well as the flora degenerated when “transplanted” from the Old World to the New. Like the imported plants, they argued, people in America did not mature properly (they had children early, their health declined while still young, and, to the French, the colonies had never produced a man of genius). In order to prove that everything was in fact larger and grander in America, Jefferson had compiled sets of information about the great size of native trees and animals as well as the spectacular landscape of Virginia.

Jefferson’s endeavour to prove the French wrong is the beginning of a story in which botany served patriotic purposes. In the eighteenth century, Philip J. Pauly explains in Fruits and Plains, “Americans interested both in nature and nation-building recognized that plants and pests were major issues in settlement and in the transition from colonial to postcolonial status”. His thesis is that horticulturists have not only transformed America’s landscape, vegetation and economy but have also shaped the national identity of the United States over the course of the past 250 years. Pauly examines four aspects of American horticulture: plant introduction (Jefferson, for example, said that “the greatest service which can be rendered to any country is to add a useful plant to its culture”); the issues around “naturalizing” foreign species (making them survive the changeable North American climate); the “hidden” economic potential of native species; and the fight against invasive foreign species – all in their wider political, social and economic context. In Pauly’s telling, the history of horticulture is one of tensions between the “desires for the exotic, enthusiasms for the native, and fears of the alien”.

Fruits and Plains tells the stories of tree collectors, fruit hybridization and pest control that were particular to America and infused with patriotism. The tree-planting campaigns across the United States in the mid-nineteenth century are a good example of how the choice of tree species had political meanings. There were those campaigners who believed that all kinds of trees should be planted, because as long as they could adapt to the North American climate it didn’t matter where they had come from. On the opposing side there were the arboricultural nationalists who hated European and Asian trees – the fast-growing Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima) from China, for example, was vilified by the prolific garden writer and landscape designer Andrew Jackson Downing as a “plague”. Native towering trees, luscious evergreens and flowering shrubs, on the other hand, were regarded as fitting expressions of the nation’s sublime character. In particular, the magnificent redwoods which were added to the patriotic vocabulary with the westward expansion to California. The only problem was that the British had named them Wellingtonia gigantea – an insult to the Americans who pleaded for Washingtonia californica. Even worse, these West Coast conifers were easier to procure from English nurseries (which had been supplied by plant hunters) than directly from across the Rocky Mountains.

Despite the tussles over native and foreign species, trees became so important that in 1873 Congress passed the Timber Culture Act (later repealed by the Forest Reserve Act 1891) which allowed settlers to receive 160 acres if they planted forty acres with timber trees. By the end of the nineteenth century, planters had changed the American landscape, as trees shaded areas of the Midwestern prairies where for centuries only grass had grown.

Plants also played a defining role in providing America with economic independence and therefore power. Like Jefferson in the 1780s (when he smuggled rice from Italy to South Carolina, at the risk of the death penalty) many other Americans came to believe that the successful cultivation of a foreign species was a patriotic act. One such example was upland cotton (Gossypium hirsutum) from the West Indies, which by the mid-1820s had become the greatest export commodity of the United States. The planting of white mulberry for an American silk production became another craze (unprofitable though) as did the idea of tea plantations. And in 1857 a government commissioner reported that America’s slaves could easily outdo the “enfeebled and poorly-fed Asian” and hired the famous British plant collector Robert Fortune to procure tea plants (Camellia sinensis) from China. Two years later, 32,000 tea bushes were nurtured in brand-new glasshouses in the “Government Experimental and Propagating Garden” on the Mall at the foot of the Capitol in Washington DC. The enterprise came to an end during the Civil War when the hothouse was turned into a military hospital.

Foreign species could also cause havoc in the economy and American landscape. The Hessian fly (Mayetiola destructor), for example, which ravaged the wheat harvest across the New England states was thought to have arrived in the straw bedding of the Hessian troops during the War of Independence. Such was its importance that George Washington corresponded with landowners about wheat species which might resist the attacks of the insect, and Jefferson spent several weeks travelling through the New England states interviewing farmers and inspecting fields, later filing a report to the American Philosophical Society. But it was the President of the Royal Society Joseph Banks (who had become the botanical adviser to the British government) who brought the issue into the wider political arena when he instigated the prohibition of the import of American grain, after receiving reports that the cargo could be carrying the Hessian fly into Britain. Thomas Paine got involved, telling Banks that he believed the embargo was “only a political manoeuvre”, while Banks warned Jefferson that “obloquy” would descend on Americans if they would “wilfully bring over the Fly” in revenge against the British. Invasions of foreign species, Pauly states, “would challenge plantsmen and scientists in the centuries to come”.

Fruits and Plains coalesces many ideas and arguments that have been discussed over the past decade in an academic context, and by bringing them together Philip Pauly has written a new chapter in the history of American horticulture. He has done a huge amount of research, but sometimes there is so much information that the main arguments disappear behind a mass of names, facts and dates. It can make for dense reading, but the reader who persists will be rewarded with some illuminating insights about the importance of American horticulture in the shaping of the nation.


Philip J. Pauly
FRUITS AND PLAINS
The horticultural transformation of America
352pp. Harvard University Press. £29.95 (US $39.95).
978 0 674 02663 6



Andrea Wulf is the author of The Brother Gardeners: Botany, empire and the birth of an obsession, published earlier this year.