During my visit to the Philippines two months ago, a good friend of mine gave me a bag of pistachio nuts which her sister, Pin, had sent her from the US. Pin and her family live in Delano, California, and she regularly sends food packages that includes pistachio nuts, almonds, dates and raisins to her sister in the Philippines.
My friend, whom I call Ate Nene (ate means elder sister, like pi in Thai), lived and worked in Delano for more than 30 years before she returned home to the Philippines when she retired. She told me how vast areas of land in Delano were used to harvest grapes and grow pistachio and almond trees. The dates that Pin sends her are also grown in California.
Thankfully export and import restrictions were a lot more lax in the past. If the US was as strict before as it is today in allowing the importation of plants none of these would now grow there. And had it not been for the botanists and plant collectors who combed the world for economic crops to introduce to growers, Americans wouldn't have been enjoying the many exotic fruits they have today.
Many fruits and fruit trees imported to Thailand from the US originate from plants from other parts of the world. The mango tree growing on our farm, which purportedly came from Florida, for example, could have descended from one of the four varieties that botanist and plant explorer David Fairchild introduced from India in 1902. The avocados on local supermarket shelves might have originated from the seeds that Fairchild collected from Chile in 1899, or the ones that botanist Guy N Collins introduced from Guatemala in 1906.
In his book The World Was My Garden: Travels of a Plant Explorer, Fairchild (1869-1954), writes of how he travelled the world in search of new plants for the then fledgling US Department of Agriculture. One wealthy world traveller, Barbour Lathrop, took Fairchild under his wing and financed many of his plant collecting expeditions. Lathrop encouraged his ideas and financed his collection of vegetables, fruits, drug plants, grains and other types of useful plants as yet unknown in America.
Historically while British botanists combed the jungles of the New World to discover new species and send samples home to further their knowledge, American explorers mainly investigated plants already in cultivation. Yet both British and American botanists braved dangerous paths in their travels that took them away from home for years on end.
In his book Fairchild recalls how, as they almost reached the top of the mighty Andes in Chile, his mule slipped on the ice and fell to his knees. "There was a horrid moment of suspense while he struggled to save himself and me from plunging down a thousand-foot abyss. But my luck held and I lived to tell the tale," he wrote.
His colleague, Frank Meyer, was not so lucky. He drowned while on his way to Shanghai in China. Among the seeds found in his baggage were those of the centipede grass (Eremochloa ophiuroides), now considered one of the best lawn grasses in Florida. "Many thousands of children were playing on lawns of Meyer's grass, but few know the history of its introduction," Fairchild wrote.
Meyer's earlier collections included dwarf lemon and jujubes from China, drought-resistant wild almonds from Chinese Turkestan, and wild olives from Baluchistan, among many others.
Sending home cuttings and live plants from Asia and elsewhere was not easy. Travel then was only by ship and it took months before the plants reached their destination. To ensure their survival, Fairchild stuck the end of every cutting into a raw potato, to supply the cuttings with the necessary moisture for the long trip to Washington. Seeds of mangosteen from Java were sent by packing them in dry charcoal, "as Java in those days", Fairchild wrote in his book, "was almost as distant as the moon".
It was soon found, however, that mangosteen was too tender to grow even in southern Florida with its tropical climate. Attempts were made to find hardier varieties but these, too, failed, otherwise the mangosteen would have been grown in America today.
There were many other crops which failed, either because the country was too cold or from lack of acceptance from both consumers and growers. However, Fairchild and the Section of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction, later shortened to Section of Plant Introduction, which he set up, were credited for the introduction of hundreds of thousands of economic crops. Among these are the almonds, dates and pistachio nuts which Pin regularly sends to Ate Nene.
From Cape Town in South Africa in 1903, Fairchild collected eucalyptus seeds, some of which are now gigantic trees at the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. He was also instrumental in bringing in Japanese cherry trees to Washington DC in 1912. Today, their blooming symbolises the arrival of spring in the US capital, which holds the National Cherry Blossom Festival every year to kick off the busy tourist season.
The World Was My Garden: Travels of a Plant Explorer takes readers to the remote places Fairchild and his colleagues explored in search of seeds and plants. It also gives readers a glimpse of different cultures and what the world was like from the late 1800s to about 1950.
Throughout this period the US was sparsely populated and Miami, now a major tourist destination, was still undeveloped. The book, published in 1938, is one of the best on plant exploration I have read.
Email nthongtham@gmail.com.
