(Read at the Ohio Nut Growers Annual Meeting, Ohio Agricultural
Experiment Station, August 16, 1946.)
Where did the Persian, or so-called "English" walnut come from? Why is
it a good commercial nut? The Pecan? How far can it be carried north
beyond its natural, or original, environment? The Pawpaw? Why is it not
a good commercial fruit? Why don't most people like it? What is the
matter with the mulberry in America? In China and Japan it has a score
of uses and great popularity.
These questions need an answer, and the answer almost invariably is that
the poorer varieties and species have had but little attention and
development by human beings while the better ones, Persian walnuts,
grapes, melons, apples, dates, figs--all have had much attention and
painstaking selection--in some cases for centuries. Upon the other hand,
to cite a contrasting case the black walnut has no such history. It is
the baby among nuts--a pure American baby--waiting for some
nursemaid--for many nursemaids--to tend and develop it as a prince among
trees should be developed.
Let us look back into the story behind a few--a very few--of our better
known fruits and nuts and see, if we can, how they happened.
In America once lived a man nicknamed "Johnny Appleseed." His neighbors
called him a "crackpate." He had a mania for planting tree seeds
wherever he went. As a rule they were haphazardly selected seeds, but
usually appleseeds.
What started him upon this crazy journey through the wilderness?
Whatever it was, it would be worth while to isolate the germ and with it
inoculate our present-day soil wasters.
But he was not the first one of his kind. Hundreds of pre-historic
planters had gone before him. For years, now, explorers have been
searching out and sending back to America certain valuable discoveries.
Tremendously interesting, all of them. As one reads, it becomes
increasingly evident that a considerable amount of scientific plant and
animal breeding, selection, perhaps even grafting and artificial cross
fertilization, budding and slip propagating may have been practiced by
pre-historic, intelligent, forgotten men long before our modern times.
We usually find, today, that the best plants and animals have had their
start in some center of old civilization. China, Manchuria, Japan,
Indo-China, India, Persia, Asia Minor, Central America, Oceania--these
places, the nurseries of all existing races of men are today the bonanza
spots for these explorers. Such a coincidence could hardly have been due
to chance. It must surely occur to the mind of anyone who cares to put
two and two together that, in each of these centers, other ancient
gatherers and planters had been busy in their day, just as our own
explorers and experiment station scientists are carrying on today--our
modern, scientific Johnny Appleseeds.
It is hardly possible, here, to follow to the ends of the earth all of
the trails of the tribe of Johnny Appleseed. One little section will do
well enough for purposes of illustration. Let us consider Iran, or, as
our fathers knew it, Persia. Here is a field that, possibly because of
previous plunderings, is not now the most fruitful of our sources of
plant and animal discovery, yet it is an eye-opener, and will do very
well as a type of similar test-plots throughout the world.
Here is a short list of only a few of the plants which have been
developed for centuries, and were reported in the last century as
growing in Persia--many, no doubt, descended from stocks which once grew
in the famous hanging gardens of Babylon: apples, pears, filberts
muskmelons, watermelons, grapes, peaches, plums, nectarines. And of
flowers, these: marigold, chrysanthemum, hollyhock, narcissus, tulip,
tuberose, aster, wallflower, dalia, white lily, hyacinth, violet,
larkspur, pink and finally, the famous rose of Persia, from whence comes
the attar of roses for which Persia is still famous. It would seem that
someone must have possessed a knowledge of plant propagation in Persia
centuries ago.
Several of these products have had their influence upon the history and
poetry of the world. It will be remembered by most high school students
that when the Caesars and big shots of Rome and Greece wished to create
a big splash in the social ponds of their day, they sent, at enormous
expense, for melons and dates from Persia. Melons, in particular, seemed
to be the high spot in those Lucullan feasts, and, in this connection it
is well to remember that Lucullus, himself, as commanding general of a
Roman legion, had long lived in Persia and had, no doubt, acquired a
taste for Persian delicacies. His princely estates near Rome, no doubt,
grew rare plants from Asia Minor and were very likely tended by the
skilled Aryan, early Accadian or Semitic gardeners of Persia. These
slaves were probably descended from and were heir to the trade secrets
of some of the very builders of that seventh wonder of the world, the
hanging gardens of Babylon. Except for those forgotten workers from
Persia, one may well wonder whether, today, our Rocky Ford, Ohio Sugar,
or Hearts-of-Gold muskmelon delicacies would exist at all.
An interesting side-light may be found in the history of the peach.
Originally this fruit was in all probability a poisonous variety of
almond. What wizard, or succession of wizards, was it who created a
peach from a pest--an asset from a liability? Persian, probably. Whoever
did it, it constitutes one of the outstanding miracles of plant
breeding, whether natural or artificial. The poison was sealed within
the seed (where it remains to this day) and the nectar of the gods was
bred into the pulp around it.
Consider also the Persian walnut, now, for some strange reason,
popularly called "English" walnut. This delicacy, too, was unlikely to
have happened merely by chance. It was, no doubt, bred by a race of men
trained in observation and experiment such as the Persians preeminently
were. Having first been nomads, domesticators and breeders of animals;
they eventually became husbandmen, breeders of trees and plants, and
they undoubtedly found that the principles which were so usefully
employed in producing animal variations could also be used in producing
and fixing plant varieties. The pollen or germ of an outstanding good
male individual, when brought into contact with the pistil or ovum of an
outstanding female individual of the same species will produce a scion
that is more likely than any other to have good qualities. Here was the
secret of most of the progress which has been made in both animal and
plant breeding, a secret of immense value--so valuable, in fact, that it
was guarded for generation after generation by a close-mouthed
priesthood.
Just as, in the middle ages, the monasteries of Europe and Asia kept
alive the tiny flame of Greek and Roman culture throughout the foggy
ignorance of the Dark Ages, so did the priests of Baal, of Ashtoreth, of
Marduk and of Ormuzd pass on the torch of their day to their successors
who were Greeks and Romans. The Eleusinian mysteries, which at a later
time were associated with a considerable amount of sensual, closely
guarded ritual, were, in the Greek period, celebrated in the temple of
Ceres in Eleusis. The origin of these sacred mysteries is lost in the
shadow of profound antiquity. We know, only, that they were in the
safekeeping of many generations of priests who jealously guarded them
from thieving and ignorant conquerors. These mysteries were probably, at
bottom, a body of scientific truths. They undoubtedly had to do with a
store of information, painfully gleaned for generations, about those
facts of reproduction, selection and beneficient fertility which are so
close to the Holy of Holies of creation itself. Probably these precious
mysteries could be simmered down to a few fundamentals and such as are
now generally practiced by all plant and animal breeders. And they are
not fully understood today, any more than they were fully understood
three thousand years ago.
By the practice of these simple arts, hedged in with taboos and
religious inhibitions, Persia, Assyria, and all Mesopotamia became the
garden spot of the world where things seemed to grow as they grew no
place else. Here, in fact, was said to have been located the only
genuine and original Garden of Eden, pointed out to this day by the
faithful as the veritable spot where the father and mother of the race
lived in a laborless, exhaustless Paradise.
Mention has been made of the probability that the Persians, who
originally were nomadic and therefore were chiefly interested in the
domestication of animals--which means, really, selective breeding--used
this knowledge in plant breeding when they finally settled down. The big
leap from nomadic to settled life must have caused the old timers of
that day plenty of headaches. It was a new deal to top all New Deals.
Was it, perhaps, some Johnny Appleseed who engineered the New Deal of
that day?
Let us guess at the method he used. As the nomad tribe passed from place
to place with its goats, its sheep, its camels, Johnny with his sons and
grandsons would take to prettying up the camp sites a bit. He
particularly like the dates from one palm that grew upon an oasis far
down the desert. He carried the seeds from this tree and planted them at
various stopping places. He did the same thing with some especially
sweet nuts from a walnut tree which he had found, let us say, in the
Caucasus Mountains. He set out many bright-blossomed desert weeds in
order to attract the wild honey bees. Bees! Wherever there were bees, he
had found flowers that reproduced themselves, trees that bore fruit.
Some of these bees he found to be good workers and others he found lazy,
quarrelsome and inefficient. He killed out the quarrelsome colonies and
built hiding places for the better ones. In short, he did so much to
make the camping places cozy, comfortable and in every way desirable
that finally it became more and more difficult for the tribe to tear
itself away on moving day. By reason of the small irrigation
arrangements which Johnny had found desirable for his plantings and his
bees, grass became more abundant and the flocks did not need to be
moved so often. In time, the whole tribe wakened to the fact that a
revolution had taken place. They did not need to move at all, ever!
There was plenty of grumbling from the die-hards, but here the tribe
stuck. It refused to budge.
In time, a certain phrase, current throughout that part of the world,
was used to describe this pleasant country: "A land flowing with milk
and honey!"
Unfortunately, it was a land, also, which could not fail, in the flower
of its wealth and luxury, to attract the attention of those savage
northerners who lived beyond this favored land. They came, they saw, and
eventually they conquered. When Rome had definitely destroyed the flower
of Asia Minor's civilization, the Roman proconsuls and merchants
"rescued" and carried back to Italy many of the rarest of Mesopotamia's
possessions. Among these, perhaps, were those indispensable
wonder-workers among the flowers, the better bees of Persia. And this
may be the reason why, these many centuries later, our bee experts still
recommend that, if we wish to increase the strength and productivity of
a backward hive of bees, we buy and introduce into the hive an Italian
queen. Her ancient and still prepotent virility can almost invariable be
relied upon to transfuse the colony with new and fruitful vigor. An
"Italian" queen, is it? We wonder, as we think of that venerable land of
Eden which once flowed with milk and honey, whether this so-called
Italian queen might not more correctly be named Persian.
You see, in this story we are traveling backwards into history like Ally
Oop in his time machine. But beyond Persia one can go only in
imagination. For the Persians, too, were a conquering nation and, no
doubt, gathered their booty of gold and sheep and camels, of flowers and
bees, from all the then known world which was subject to them. So
perhaps Persia, too, has no more right to label her treasures Persian
than has Italy with her presumably mislabeled Italian bees, nor England
with her undoubtedly mislabeled English walnuts. However, the work of
Johnny Appleseed has always belonged, not to his tribe nor to his
locality, but to the world. These same Persian walnuts take rank among
the better clues by which migrations of the Aryans may be traced over
the face of the earth. For instance, not only do they take root easily
in the mild, friendly climate of California, but much hardier strains
are found to have climbed the Carpathians and the steppes of Russia
almost to the very doors of Moscow. Scions of these hardier strains have
very recently been made to grow and yield their nuts in America as far
north as Toronto and are being set out in numbers in the northern part
of the United States. How well they will prosper in this new, more
variable and chilly climate remains to be seen, but the start is made.
No doubt it will be by Johnny's old method of patient and repeated
selection, first for hardiness then for quality, that the planned result
will be accomplished.
The contributions of Persia and the plantings of its forgotten
scientists have here merely been touched on. Nothing, for instance, has
been said about her great groves of mulberry trees, which led to
silk-worms, which led to silk, which led to the production of
jewel-bright vegetable dyes, which led to the development of a
decorative art in fabrics that is rivaled by China, alone, in all the
world. And of course, Aryan Persia is only one of the many treasure
centers of ancient civilization. In scores of racial settlements
elsewhere our lives today are being changed and enriched in innumerable
ways by the hands of those old miracle-workers whose names were writ in
water and whose works are immortal. The accomplishments of China are of
such magnitude that even now we are only beginning to discover our debt
to her. India, Indo-China, Mongolia, Manchuria, Japan--all have similar
backgrounds. Even in the United States, young as it is, the migrations
of pre-historic races have left their trails in the gardens and forests
around us. Pecans from the South, for example, have been carried North
and are gradually developing hardy strains that survived in Indiana and
Illinois groves.
Enough has been said to blaze the way to the end at which I have been
driving. It may begin to look as though modern plant explorers have now
followed the plant-spoor of human migrations to their final limits. It
may look, too, as though the ends of these converging trails will find
civilization at last firmly established. Or will they?
The future race, let us admit, may eventually be able, by means of an
almost unthinkable development of food, clothing, building and medical
supplies of a synthetic or semi-synthetic nature, to dispense with some
of the agriculture we know. This is the prediction of some scientists.
Let it stand. What then is to be done with the land upon which our food
crops had formerly been raised? Manifestly, it must again be covered
with hurricane-control, flood-control, and erosion-control vegetation,
chiefly trees, perhaps. Trees for safety's sake, trees for beauty's
sake, for recreation's sake, trees for food's--yes, food's sake, for
flavor and health, trees and vegetation as sources for the very
synthetic that are supposed to supplant them; and last but not least,
trees and vegetation for the protection and perpetuation of animal life,
of bird life, and insect life. All these are inseparably bound up with
human life.
Come what may at the hands of a short-sighted human race, no matter what
surface changes may come about in human eating habits, housing styles,
farming or factory practice, still the winds will sweep the earth in
hurricanes where there is nothing to impede them; the waters and ice of
the heavens will still tear apart and level the hills, will gash the
valleys and will carry off the earth and dump it into the sea. Following
this, the sun will burn the unprotected earth into a cinder. Nothing can
change these facts. From the beginning of life upon the earth, trees and
vegetation have been the chief means by which a balance has been
maintained between the antagonistically destructive and creative natures
of the elements.
Do we realize fully, I wonder, how important is the work of this group
and the parent NNGA? The interest of its members is chiefly in "wild"
trees that produce food crops--mainly, but not exclusively, nut crops.
And they are interested not merely in planting and testing names and
known varieties, but in finding and testing the best individuals among
the wild trees, planting selected seed, enjoying the exciting gamble
which is always sealed up in the magic, unknown potentialities of a
hybrid.
As, centuries ago, the Persian walnut was rescued from the forest and
developed into the splendid nut we know today, so the American black
walnut can be rescued; its nut can be improved and developed by
selection and cross-breeding. It is a grand mahogany-like timber tree
which is becoming far too scarce. Each war takes its toll for gun
stocks. Its nuts are the only nuts within my knowledge, not even
excepting our lost American chestnuts, that retain their full
distinctive flavor through cooking. Nothing can replace its flavor in
candy or cake making. The tree is indigenous to America and, in contrast
to the Persian, has only decades, rather than centuries of selective
breeding behind it. No one can tell what even one short century of
intelligent selection may make of this great tree.
We Americans, in fact, have barely started on the Appleseed trail, a
trail which tends toward the development of a permanent perennial,
rather than annual, type of agriculture, with trees, shrubs, vines and
perennial grasses its chief interest. For, no matter what chemistry has
in store for us in the way of plastics for construction and of
synthetics for foods and drugs, the good earth is still our sole source
of supply. The chestnut, the mulberry, persimmon, pawpaw, pecan,
hickory, wild cherry, the grape, the elderberry in fact the whole tribe
of fruits and nuts with flavors found nowhere else on earth--all are
growing along this ancient trail. They offer an infinite variety of
opportunity for exploration and discovery. To work with them gives one a
sense of sharing in the work of creation.