Fruit: An Illustrated History - Hardcover

Blackburne-Maze, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1552977803 ISBN 13: 9781552977804

Publisher: Firefly Books, 2003

Synopsis

A visual feast of stunning illustrations and authoritative text.

Fruit appears in art, mythology, and nearly every religious belief. The uses of fruit are varied: for food, drink, paint pigment, decoration, and medicine. The cultivation of fruit encouraged the development of plant propagation methods, grafting, hybridization, and selective breeding to produce ever improved varieties.

In this book Blackburne-Maze challenges myths such as the story of Johnny Appleseed whose real name was John Chapman. The fable that he indiscriminately scattered seeds is admittedly the worst way to propagate fruit trees. In truth he established a chain of successful apple nurseries that stretched from Pennsylvania to Indiana.

Fruit is illustrated with 300 large, striking and superbly reproduced color illustrations from the Lindley Library of the Royal Horticultural Society. Created by the finest botanical artists, these graceful illustrations are notable for their historical value in chronicling the evolution of fruit and as masterpieces in their own right. Included are varieties of fruit now extinct or no longer in widespread cultivation.

The book is organized into the 4 major fruit groups and covers 61 varieties:

Pome (apples, pears, etc.)
Stone (plum, cherry, peach, etc.)
Berry (currant, blueberry, etc.)
Exotic (fig, citrus, olive, almond, etc.)

A companion volume to the critically acclaimed and extremely popular, Flora, this book will appeal to gardeners, art lovers, and food connoisseurs.

About this title

About the Author

Peter Blackburne-Maze is a leading expert in the history and cultivation of fruit. He is the author of many books and regularly contributes to Garden News, The Kitchen Garden, and The Garden (the Royal Horticultural Society's journal).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

We can all list a range of different fruit -- apples, pears, plums, bananas and oranges immediately spring to mind, for example. From a botanical point of view, however, a fruit is defined as a 'more or less fleshy pod, capsule or some other body produced by a plant in which it forms and carries its seeds'. The flesh makes the fruit look attractive to eat, and this helps seed distribution. Indeed, many a good seedling fruit tree started its life as a core or stone thrown from a car window and onto a fertile road verge. The feature of sweetness isn't crucial to the definition of a fruit (tomatoes, cucumbers and marrows are all perfectly good fruit), but in the popular sense of the word a 'fruit' has to be sweet, and this is the definition we will use in this book.

HOW IT ALL BEGAN

All the fruits in cultivation today are selections, mutations, hybrids or descendants of genera and species that originally grew in the wild. Prehistoric fruity remains have been found all round the world, including seeds of wild strawberry, raspberry, blackberry, sloe, bird cherry and crab apple. The spread of wild fruits in the world's temperate regions was dependent on the movement of the ice caps: as the earth's temperature rose, growing conditions improved. And, in the warmer regions, natural seed dissemination and other methods of propagation further promoted the spread of wild fruits across the globe.

The presence or absence of naturally growing food has largely dictated the advance of human beings into previously unpopulated areas. It is only comparatively recently that settlers have brought their own food plants with them. This phenomenon has taken place throughout the ages, and nowadays there are very few people in the world reliant on naturally occurring foodstuffs.

More than five thousand years ago (perhaps even earlier), the climate was favourable for agriculture, so huge areas were cultivated. Most temperate fruits originated from Central Asia and what was then Asia Minor -- the Caucasus, Turkestan and the Black Sea region -- where vast areas of woodland with wild pears, crab apples and cherry plums still exist (indeed, some of the wild grapes in Central Asia are identical to today's cultivated varieties). Further afield, there are quinces in Azerbaijan, apricots in Armenia and Syria, along with cherry plums, bird cherries and medlars.

This abundance of natural food in what became known as the Fertile Crescent (reaching from Iran to south of the Caspian Sea, to Turkey, through Palestine and into Egypt) encouraged nomadic tribes to settle in the area. This often brought new blood into an already flourishing civilization, therefore improving it further. During this period, the peach (Prunus persica) came from China (not Persia), where it has now been cultivated for more than 4000 years.

The first fruit to be stored for any length of time was probably the plum. These would have been sun-dried and then packed away for future use. Apples, too, were stored. They could have been dried as well, but were also laid on straw and placed in dry and cool surroundings.

Certainly as far back as 500 BC, Ancient Greek and Roman writers were writing about fruit and wine. Already both cultures were raising fruit, as well as growing vines from cuttings, and even then it was known that this kind of vegetative propagation was necessary amongst fruit plants in order to produce progeny identical to that of the parent. About two thousand years ago, fruit had become a highly important crop throughout the Mediterranean area. Excavations have shown pottery, glass, even the walls of houses, decorated with fruits. Evidence of orchards, nurseries and fruit markets were plentiful around Pompeii and Herculaneum, for example. Before the devastating eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, the slopes of the volcano were home to thriving horticultural and viticultural industries.

It was also around this time that varietal names started to appear. Many European fruit-growing practices started during the times of Roman occupation -- the English, for example, had little knowledge of horticulture or agriculture until the Romans occupied the country. After the Romans left (in AD 410), English growers returned almost to the wild for seven hundred years, but then the Normans invaded and got the fruit trade on its feet again, a situation that was partly aided by the self-sufficient monasteries.

The big explosion, however, came with the spread of fruit cultivation from Europe to the rest of the world (and the United States in particular). Once North America, Australia and Australasia were discovered and colonized, things simply snowballed on a global scale. This fact is prominent in most of the early books on fruit growing -- the further back you go, the more familiar the fruit varieties and methods of cultivation seem to become. North America and Australasia once (literally) put on the map, soon became the founts of knowledge on the subject.

The original settlers carried with them a sort of skeleton agriculture (including horticulture), which would see them through the first all-important years of colonization. Once the trauma of setting up a community in a new and totally isolated land (often complete with unfriendly local inhabitants) had been overcome, more time could then be spent on 'research and development'. This involved searching for local species of familiar plants and either taming them with cultivation or using them to breed locally desirable characteristics into existing varieties. Here, one often comes across occasions where the pupil overtakes the tutor, and the modern North American apple industry is a prime example. Of all the varieties bred in the USA during the last hundred years or so, most are eaten all over the world and many are also grown there -- for example, 'Golden Delicious', 'McIntosh, 'Jonathan', 'Jonagold, 'Red Delicious' and many more.

METHODS OF PROPAGATION

Seeds are the most common and cheapest way to grow a large number of plants quickly. However, seed is only useful when it gives rise to plants that are virtually identical to the parent. Although this is quite easily achieved with flowers and vegetables, it simply isn't possible with tree and bush fruits, whose progeny, when grown from seeds, seldom bears any resemblance to the parent. Any of the ancestors of an individual modern hybrid variety are likely to appear in the seedlings and normally it is the oldest genes that are the most dominant.

With vegetative propagation, part of the plant you wish to propagate is detached and is encouraged to form roots and develop into another plant. Most bush fruits, for example, are propagated from stem cuttings, but unfortunately cuttings from tree fruits do not root readily. It was the Romans who found the answer. Tree fruits, then and now, are propagated most easily and successfully by budding or grafting. A rootstock (a ready-made root system) and a 'scion' (a piece of the tree you are propagating) are joined and bound together. In a short time they fuse, and buds on the scion start to grow, eventually forming the new tree. And, because this is formed from part of the original tree, it is absolutely identical to it.

Later on, this gave rise to a peculiar belief that an individual variety of fruit had a predetermined life expectancy. According to this theory, when a seed germinated and grew into a new variety, an imaginary internal clock started ticking and continued to do so in all the progeny raised from it. This ticking would continue through the generations --until, say, a hundred years had passed after the 'birth' of the variety, when all its living descendants dropped dead and the variety was extinct. Such a theory is completely false, although not quite as stupid as it might sound, because something similar does actually occur with the bamboo, which has such an 'alarm clock' that goes off when it flowers. All the offspring of any particular bamboo plant will flower at more or less the same time, then it

About this edition

• Publisher: Firefly Books
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1552977803
• ISBN 13: 9781552977804
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 344