by Noel Kingsbury
Copyright © 2009 The University of Chicago Press
Published by The University of Chicago Press

From Chapter 4

VEGETABLE MULES - The Beginning of Deliberate Breeding

There is a crush of people around the tables, but all they are looking at is onions! Onions (Allium cepa) neatly tied, every one a perfect specimen, their usually untidy leaves neatly plaited with raffia; big single onions, much bigger than you could ever buy in the shops; bunches of spring onions, every one clean, straight, lush, perfect; there is even a special section for garlic.

Welcome to the Newent Onion Fair, just one of thousands of events which happen throughout the summer from one end of Britain to another, in which flowers, fruit and vegetables are exhibited in competition. Intended for amateur growers, some of the exhibitors do more or less nothing else – dedicated onion men may show the same bulb in Swansea on one weekend, in Chesterfield the next and Corby the week after. Newent’s is the only dedicated onion fair in Britain; more common is a flower and produce show as part of a larger event, a village fete or agricultural show, with a community hall or canvas marquee lined with tables, on which are laid out rows of carrots neatly aligned, their roots tapering to a hair, impossibly long parsnips (Pastinaca sativa) and polished and perfect-looking potatoes. Although by no means unique to Britain, it is here that the flower and produce show is most widespread, and most woven into the fabric of community life. Evolving out of the competitive showing of flowers that began during the 17th century (see Chapter 13), the contemporary flower and produce show is not just a quaint custom of a notoriously eccentric nation, but the legacy of what was once a highly effective way of comparing and judging plants.

It was during the 19th century that the show took shape as a means of enabling growers to compete and compare; in horticulture it has always reigned supreme, in the farming world crops have always tended to be overshadowed by the big beasts of the show ring. Seed of good varieties seen in shows however would circulate informally, certain farmers and growers would acquire a reputation for a particular variety, names would be given, and increasingly, distinct varieties would emerge. Later, as horticulture and agriculture became more commercial, shows became a marketplace for seed merchants and nurseries. Under the wing of organizations, such as Britain’s Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), some shows have become institutionalized, London’s annual Chelsea Flower Show has for example been a national forum for plant introduction and marketing ever since it first pitched its marquee in 1905.

Closely-related to the show system is the giving of awards to particular plant varieties; given the pre-eminence of Britain in matters of horticulture, the Awards of Merit and First Class Certificates given to fruit, vegetable or ornamental plant varieties, instituted in 1859, are recognized worldwide. Interestingly, no comparable set of internationally-recognized awards for field crops has ever evolved, although during the latter part of the 19th century, international shows of manufactured and agricultural products were an important feature of the commercial and industrial calendars of the world – at which awards given to crop varieties were much prized by their breeders and producers.

The show as an institution came about because growers were faced with more and more variety, and because they were under pressure to succeed commercially. It was now important to keep up, to make a profit, to choose the best for the land; what better way to make assessments of the host of new varieties than going to a social event? It would be possible to meet your peers, make new contacts, and enjoy yourself too – shows have traditionally involved plenty of eating and drinking.

That so many new varieties were there to be chosen from was the result of a newly found interest in and awareness of the opportunities offered by the plant world. Once it was realized that plant varieties had a certain malleability, then it became possible to try to change them to suit human needs. After making much progress in the fields of plant nutrition, soil management, crop rotation, crop management and propagation the scene was set, during the latter years of the 18th century, for a much more active intervention in the heredity of the plant world.

Shows however, played roles other than the strictly horticultural or commercial. The very act of showing seems to have become a focus for either social activity or one-upmanship; when this happened breeding became almost an end in itself. John Lindley (1799-1865), editor of the highly influential British journal The Gardeners Chronicle and a leading figure in both British botany and horticulture had several times attacked the breeding of plants specifically to win prizes at shows. This was a fundamental weakness in the whole show system, and it came to be dramatically illustrated in American mid-west corn shows (see Chapter 10). Sometimes shows became almost obsessively obscure, as with the gooseberry (Ribes uva-crispa) shows of 19th century Britain, when working men in industrial counties of northern England and the Midlands formed themselves into societies, constituted with presidents, secretaries and stewards, for the purpose of running gooseberry shows – weight being the decisive factor. Quite why this fruit, always something of a minority taste, should become the subject of what only could be described as a cult, remains a mystery. As happened with florists’ shows (see Chapter 13), prizes were contributed by wealthier members: cash or valuables such as copper kettles, teapots, cups or medals.
The gooseberry growers even had an anthem, the first verse going:

Come all you jovial gardeners and listen unto me
Whilst I relate the different sorts of winning Gooseberries
This famous institution was founded long ago
That men might meet and drink and have a Gooseberry Show

Subsequent verses were mostly composed of the names of winning varieties. The most famous of these was the red ‘London’ berry, celebrated with its own verse:

This London of renown, was that famous Huntsman’s son
Who was raised in a Cheshire Village, near the Maypole in Acton
While in bloom he was but small, yet still so fast he grew
That everyone admired him, for his equals are but few.

The ‘London’ was unusual for a show gooseberry in having a short and punchy name: most tried to incorporate a mention of both their raiser and a mention of something stirring or patriotic. A list of 1800 includes: ‘Boardman’s Royal Oak’, ‘Mason’s Hercules’, ‘Hill’s Royal Sovereign’, ‘Worthington’s Glory of Eccles’, ‘Parkinson’s Goldfinder’ and ‘Fox’s Jolly Smoker’.

The concept of hybridizing as a means of improving both crops and flowers steadily gained strength during the 19th century. Few accounts or records remain, but horticultural and agricultural literature of the time, at least in Britain, makes frequent references to hybridization. A letter to the Gardeners’ Chronicle in 1843 writes of the author’s father having raised around 90 hybrids of Cape heaths (erica species) between 1790 and 1841, and having experimented with rhododendrons as well as several genera of small South African bulbs. Rhododendrons, which hybridize easily, were certainly a popular subject for early experimentation. Roses, irises and various other ornamentals were also widely experimented with (see Chapter 13). That the record is indistinct is not perhaps surprising: it was not at all completely clear yet that crossing one species with another was that productive in real improvement, rather than an exercise in ‘curiosity’. Religious scruples over meddling with creation may have made some early hybridizers somewhat furtive.

In 1843, John Lindley (1799-1865), the editor of the Gardeners’ Chronicle and a leader in the worlds of both botany and horticulture, wrote that “as an operation to fill up the leisure hours of the lady gardener and amateur, I do not know anything more pleasing; for there is something akin to creative power in it”, followed by a description of the basic techniques that could be used for cross-fertilizing flowers. The next year though, Lindley felt he had to warn against a hobby which was getting out of hand, using an editorial on hybridization to point out that although “we anticipate through its assistance a change in the whole face of cultivated plants” that many “so-called hybrids are not hybrids at all”. In view of hints from a variety of sources that some churchmen were against hybridizing God’s creation, he justifies it by referring to the work of the Dean of Manchester, William Herbert.

The Gardeners’ Chronicle also dealt with agricultural matters, and around this time there was a flurry of interest in the matter of improving crops; an editorial of 1845 complains that prizes were being given at shows for wheat seed, “yet it is not possible to tell anything of the quality of the wheat from the seed… any more than [someone] could determine the quality of a breed of fowls from an egg”. Sir F.A.MacKenzie, some time President of the Root and Seed Committee of the Highland Agricultural Society, had that year, pointed out the absurdity of hundreds of pounds being set aside as prize money for animals, but only £5 for plants, and proposed that the council of the Agricultural Society of England gave higher value prizes for new varieties. Not everyone was enthusiastic about new methods of improving crops though, as ‘T.A.F’, writing in the same journal in 1844, reported that he had once heard a landowner addressing a meeting of farmers say that “the powers of the earth are limited like our own, and therefore it was no use expecting greater things of it…. all he wanted to know was how to make a good dunghill, he ridiculed theorists and German philosophers… and in all this he was much cheered”.

Even not everyone in the plant breeding business thought hybridization a good idea. Alexander Livingston (1821-1898) of Ohio was a grower who specialized in producing round, juicy, tasty and productive tomatoes, unlike the ribbed, dry and hard fruit which made tomatoes (or ‘love-apples’ as they were often called) an also-ran in the vegetable garden. His opinion was that “I have no confidence in hybridizing or crossing as a method of securing new varieties….Like begets like. Rough ones beget rough ones”. For him, selection was all; he grew whole fields of tomatoes and endlessly trawled them for chance improvements, or grew promising varieties on year after year until they were good enough to name and market. That he was able to do so is probably a reflection of the fact that tomato breeding was in its infancy, and genetic variation considerable. At this stage in the evolutionary life of a cultivated plant, such methods are often good enough; although cultivated tomatoes self-fertilize, there is always some crossing, which would generate new variants.

Nineteenth century objections to Darwinism were only partly on the basis of species evolving or the timescale of evolution being different to that in the Bible; there was a further and major objection – that of species splitting to create other species. Such a suggestion was seen as blasphemous because it involved the fragmentation of God’s original plan, the sundering of Creation itself. As hybridization between species began to spread during the 19th century, it appears that there was a rumble of concern about this too, again largely from religious sources. Documentary evidence for this is hard to find, and evidence for it is largely in the form of gardeners defending themselves against accusations of sacrilege.

Unease at hybridization, originating partly in Biblical injunctions against crossing breeds of cattle, and against mules, have had a more lasting impact on our attitudes to animals than among plants. ‘Mongrel’ still has negative connotations and owners of ‘cross-breed’ dogs are still excluded from exclusive dog show like London’s Crufts. ‘Miscegenation’ was regarded with horror in societies based on racial division, such as the American Deep South. Neither word is used to describe plant varieties today and have been little used for over a century. Things were clearly different in the 19th century, as we gather from Lindley writing the Gardeners’ Chronicle in 1844; he describes how hybridizers were accused of attempting to subvert the whole order of Nature by ‘monstrous practices’ but points out natural examples of plants crossing. An editorial in the same journal in 1881 declared that “hybridizing was formerly regarded as a sacrilegious subversion of nature, and those who practiced the art were stigmatized as mischievous intermeddlers in the works of the Creator’. Some would have consigned all hybrids to the rubbish heap as being of impure descent…. gardeners did not stay their hands in the work of rearing novelties, heedless of the ‘confusion’ they were causing”.

excerpts from chapter 6 >>