“Cook had seen an avocado before, but not like this---so smooth, so green. The fruit took an express route to the greenhouse, where workers propagated the seeds, first in soil, and then suspended slightly in water. Fairchild had included written instructions that only mature trees would fruit, after several years, not months. He advised that as soon as the seedlings grew reasonable roots, they should be shipped to experiment stations in California to be shared with farmers interested in experimental crops. Cook complied, and then mostly forgot about the avocado. In California, that single shipment helped build an industry. Other avocados turned up as well, from travelers or tourists who packed the oversized seeds as souvenirs. There were one-off stories that avocados had been spotted in America before, in Hollywood in 1886 or near Miami in 1894. But none were as sturdy as Fairchild's Chilean variety, prized for its versatility, color, and flavor---résumé of strong pedigree. Fairchild's avocado would turn out to be a mix of a Guatemalan avocado and a Mexican avocado and to have been only a short-term tenant in Chilean soil before Fairchild picked it up. But as with most popular fruits, the true geographic origin faded into irrelevance. Farmers and early geneticists dissected this sample and ones that came after it to create newer cultivars attuned to more specialized climates or tastes. This work yielded a twentieth-century variety called Fuerte, Spanish for "strong," growable in the coldest conditions ever tested on an avocado. It fell from favor after proving unable to ship even modest distances without bruising.” SeedsHybridChileFuerteAvocado Book:The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats Source: The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats
“From Shanghai, Meyer had sent seeds and cuttings of oats, millet, a thin-skinned watermelon, and new types of cotton. The staff of Fairchild's office watched with anticipation each time one of Meyer's shipments were unpacked. There were seeds of wild pears, new persimmons, and leaves of so-called Manchurian spinach that America's top spinach specialist would declare was the best America had ever seen. Meyer had delivered the first samples of asparagus ever to officially enter the United States. In 1908, few people had seen a soybean, a green legume common in central China. Even fewer people could have imagined that within one hundred years, the evolved descendants of soybeans that Meyer shipped back would cover the Midwest of the United States like a rug. Soybeans would be applied to more diverse uses than any other crop in history, as feed for livestock, food for humans (notably vegetarians), and even a renewable fuel called biodiesel. Meyer also hadn't come empty-handed. He had physically brought home a bounty, having taken from China a steamer of the Standard Oil Company that, unlike a passenger ship, allowed him limitless cargo and better onboard conditions for plant material. He arrived with twenty tons, including red blackberries, wild apricots, two large zelkova trees (similar to elms), Chinese holly shrub, twenty-two white-barked pines, eighteen forms of lilac, four viburnum bushes that produced edible red berries, two spirea bushes with little white flowers, a rhododendron bush with pink and purple flowers, an evergreen shrub called a daphne, thirty kinds of bamboo (some of them edible), four types of lilies, and a new strain of grassy lawn sedge.” ChinaSeedsFlowersTreesExplorerSoybeansImportedBushesFrank Meyer Book:The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats Source: The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats