The Food Explorer

by Daniel Stone

  “My friend—you know who—by forty years of travel became like a naughty child among a host of presents,” Fairchild had once told Marian. “He wanted fresh personalities all the time. Yet we traveled year in and year out through all sorts of lands and when last we parted our eyes were moist. . . . Between us there never was nor could there ever be such a bond of sympathy, such similarity of tastes, as have brought him and me together.”

  Fairchild’s warning aside, nothing could have truly prepared Marian to meet Lathrop for the first time. When he brought Marian to call on Lathrop in a Washington hotel room in the early days of 1905, the discussion started worse than expected:

  “Uncle Barbour, this is Marian.”

  Lathrop studied her.

  “Well, she has fine eyes.”

  Then he turned to Fairchild.

  “My God, Fairy, what has happened to your hair? It looks as though it hadn’t been cut for months. You had better go right down to the barber shop and get a cut. You are a fright!”

  Lathrop turned back to Marian, his voice raised.

  “You think you can make him look like your father, do you? But your father has a great leonine head. He can wear his hair long. Fairy can’t.”

  Marian ran from the room crying, likely more embarrassed than actually stung. Fairchild followed her. In the hallway, Fairchild consoled her.

  Lathrop had criticized Fairchild hundreds of times, about his hair, his clothing, his sluggishness, his lack of manners, his lack of respect, his shallowness of intellect, and any number of other things that entered his mind and left it just as quickly. Fairchild had become immune to it all. Yet when he was insulted in front of a new lady, his new lady, the critique cut deep. Why couldn’t Lathrop understand the high stakes of this first impression, of being polite to someone important to Fairchild? Lathrop’s petulant outburst suggests he may have been bitter that Fairchild had found the companionship that had eluded Lathrop for so long. Or worse, that Lathrop lacked the self-awareness to know he had said anything wrong.

  “Good Lord, what have I done?” Lathrop said when it became clear he had offended Marian.

  It wasn’t Lathrop who repaired the uncomfortable encounter, nor was it Fairchild. It was Marian. After she stopped crying in the hallway, she suggested that perhaps Lathrop was right, that Fairchild could use a haircut. Faced with an opportunity to stand up for himself, to demonstrate stiff resolution after a stinging insult, Fairchild chose differently. He knew that battles should only be fought when they have a reasonable chance of being won, so he obeyed.

  When he returned from the hotel barbershop he found Marian and Lathrop giggling together over a story Lathrop was telling, a botched first impression granted a second chance.

  “There,” Lathrop said to Marian. “You must admit that he looks better.” Whether she thought so or not, she agreed.

  * * *

  —

  The climax of Fairchild’s courtship with Marian came one day in February, just three months after they first met. Their dating had been steady and passionate, cresting with dozens of letters, sometimes many a day. Marian traveled north to New York for an art show. Fairchild, now so devoted he was prone to theatrics, followed her secretly.

  The plan wasn’t only to casually bump into her in Grand Central Terminal. The plan was to take the same train back to Washington with her. Fairchild studied the timetables and memorized the path Marian would take to her train. The glimpse of a stunned Marian must have left Fairchild exceedingly self-satisfied.

  The plan worked. Marian gasped as Fairchild stood with a toothy grin and a bouquet of carnations. Somewhere between Trenton and Baltimore, David Fairchild asked Marian a question. And there on a moving train, as it hurried south through the rain, he and Marian Bell agreed to spend their lives together. Instead of a ring, Fairchild gave her an engagement necklace made of Mexican gold and attached to an antique Roman coin with mystic characters. If the characters had a secret meaning, it remained secret between them.

  1903. In the months before his 1905 wedding, Fairchild took a break from traveling with Lathrop (pictured seated). One of their last excursions together had been a visit to Sweden.

  Their attraction for each other was a potent factor in their decision to wed. But what mattered more was the opinion of Alexander Graham Bell, whose sole authority could approve or deny his daughter’s marriage.

  By now the permission was largely a formality. Bell liked Fairchild; the setup had been his idea, and their engagement a logical extension. Yet still, Fairchild spent three days composing a lengthy letter to detail his pedigree.

  “My dear Daddysan: for Marian says I may call you so,” he started his long-winded essay. He described his family and upbringing, his lineage of university presidents, professors, and other academics. He said that his mother once told him that he might be related to Oliver Cromwell, Britain’s first lord protector. He explained his full education and the path he had taken from Kansas to New Jersey to Washington, and then the association with Barbour Lathrop that opened his world to Java, Australia, and the islands of the South Pacific. He employed the names of scientists, both famous and obscure, with whom he had worked. Fairchild wasn’t so much trying to impress Dr. Bell as he was penning a formal petition of his worthiness to join the esteemed Bell family.

  Unsurprising to everyone, Bell agreed to the marriage. He may have been uneasy about Fairchild’s modest family—none of whom Bell had met, on account of their being distant or dead. Yet he had always valued adventure, and here was his daughter, in love with an adventurer scientist, a rare specimen in 1905, or any era.

  East Coast newspapers enjoyed the story of an artistic daughter of a famous inventor marrying a government scientist. Sensational reports spread the rumor that Marian’s dowry could be as high as one million dollars, an incredible fortune. The confidential reality was undoubtedly smaller, likely around fifty thousand dollars—a sum still astronomical for a future son-in-law with less than five thousand dollars to his name.

  The engagement was short, only eight weeks. And by pure luck, the period coincided with a new wave of exuberance in Washington for the arrival of Teddy Roosevelt’s second term, which brought a gaiety of parties all over town. Fairchild found himself with two tickets to Roosevelt’s inaugural ball at the Pension Building in the neighborhood that would eventually neighbor Chinatown. He was reluctant to fill his dance card with any name but Marian’s. And when the dances stopped, the revelers gorged themselves on creamed oysters, French peas, chicken croquettes, and deviled ham. Dessert was the most memorable part of all: a tutti-frutti salad made of candied raisins, cherries, and pineapple, a culinary safari of worldly fruits.

  On the day of their wedding, April 25, 1905, the procession of the extended Bell family to Twin Oaks, a white mansion on Woodley Road, was so hectic, Fairchild almost forgot to give Marian the corsage he had ordered specially with flowering cherry blossoms. The blooms were Marian’s favorite flower from her favorite story of her fiancé’s travels. He made himself a matching boutonniere.

  Before the ceremony he gave her one last letter, which he had written late the night prior in the moonlight, kept awake by the timeless nerves of a man before his wedding:

  April 24, 1905

  My Marian, my own darling, let’s not forget that like two leaves adrift together we are in the stream of life and let us hope no bars no shallows, no eddies nor currents are to drive us apart, but we shall reach the open sea.

  Let’s live dear girl and get from life what she holds in store for those like you and me, who’ve learned that all the world wants is a smile and a caress. It’s now our wedding day. I love you with the fullness of a heart that’s longed to love for years but has not found what now you’ve given. You’re the sweetest, dearest, girl of all. I love you, yes, I love you.

  David

  The wedding proceeded in the spring of Washington, forev
er its best season, between trees and surrounded by Marian’s abundant family. The estate was known to be the most beautiful park in Washington, where Fairchild and Marian were only granted their nuptials because the property belonged to Marian’s grandparents Gardiner and Gertrude Hubbard, who traded seasons between the estate and their Dupont Circle home, just two miles apart.

  Alexander Graham Bell, his beard blown lightly by the wind, walked his daughter down the aisle. Everyone noticed her white accordion chiffon dress with pompadour silk, her flowing veil, her bright smile. No one realized that she had forgotten to wear the corsage of cherry blossoms she had been gifted, least of all Fairchild, who stood with a stupefied smile as his bride shuffled forward.

  They laughed after the ceremony about how she forgot the flowers. And then, figuring the story would make a nice souvenir, they plucked the flowers from Marian’s corsage and from David’s boutonniere, stuffed them into two envelopes, and sealed them shut. The mementos from their wedding would be passed down through generations of their descendants, each a product of their marriage, until one hundred years later, when the erosion of time would disintegrate the petals into dust.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Cherry Trees with No Cherries

  Fairchild’s first choice for a best man to stand beside him at his wedding was his closest boyhood friend, Walter Swingle. But Swingle was abroad, searching for something, somewhere. Barbour Lathrop, his globe-trotting companion, was difficult to pin down, and unable to attend the wedding. And so, with his dearest friends unavailable, he turned to Charles Marlatt, the man who had the bare qualification of having grown up next to Fairchild in Kansas.

  Marlatt had once been the strange neighbor boy obsessed with bugs. Now he was a fully credentialed entomologist devoted to the study of American insects. Many insects were immigrants to America the same way that Fairchild’s fruits were, but Marlatt saw a more ominous future for the country if it was negligent of what was crossing its borders. With his own eyes, Marlatt had seen the damage insects could do. In the 1880s, he watched the San Jose scale, an ugly yellow insect, infest and suffocate fields in California. He took an expedition to Asia that was as desperate as it was fraught with danger to hunt for the scale’s natural predator.

  When he found a candidate species to demolish the scale, he brought an entire colony back. The predators were red and black beetles, each so graceful and feminine they became known as ladybugs (also ladybirds). Marlatt’s were the first ladybugs in America, which was a remarkable accomplishment, considering that the full colony he tried to introduce had almost fully died en route, except for two of its inhabitants—“Mr. and Mrs. Ladybug,” newspapers called them—who, with only their kinetic energy, rebuilt the population and eliminated the pesky San Jose scale. If Marlatt was born with any patience, watching this tense episode had consumed it all.

  Marlatt liked Fairchild—he was six years older and tended to see Fairchild as a younger brother. They both had a deep love for science. In a way, Marlatt was responsible for Fairchild’s love of Java. In the 1870s, it had been Marlatt who first alerted Fairchild that the famous Alfred Russel Wallace would be visiting their town. Fairchild informed his father, who then invited Wallace to stay in the Fairchild home for an evening, during which the biologist fascinated George Fairchild’s son with vivid descriptions of the Malay Archipelago.

  But in Washington, a town more professional than personal, Marlatt’s feelings toward his childhood friend had grown as lukewarm as a tight-lipped smile. To Marlatt, Fairchild enjoyed enormous privilege, first in his family connections that landed him his first job with the USDA, and then in his association with Barbour Lathrop, who financed his travels around the world. Marlatt hadn’t had it so easy. In Kansas he served as an apprentice to a government entomologist, and then did fieldwork in Texas cotton fields and Virginia orchards, delaying his opportunity to set roots and start a family. When he finally did marry, he took his wife on his scale-hunting trip—part honeymoon, part official business—to China, where Mrs. Marlatt was attacked and killed by intestinal parasites. Four years later, in 1905, Marlatt had worked his way back. He was named head of the Division of Entomology at the USDA. If Fairchild’s story had been one of good luck and hard work, Marlatt’s was a combination of bad luck and the need to work even harder. For him, fighting against invasive insects had become personal.

  In his earlier days, Marlatt believed that insects and fungi were as unstoppable as the climate, undeterred by national borders. But in 1898, he had the type of revelation that makes one sit up in bed. He realized wormy apples and mildewed grapes were just as dangerous as people infected with cholera. Plant diseases could spread quickly over large distances and wipe out entire industries. In the first few years of the twentieth century, amid all the excitement about new travel and a world open to America, Marlatt tried to explain to anyone who would listen that the same trains, ships, and canals that brought new nursery stock also brought pests, weeds, and diseases. He pointed to the infestations of periodical cicadas on his native plains of the American Midwest. The clouds of humming grasshoppers, he said, were as debilitating as the plague of locusts in the story of the Exodus.

  Even more alarming, the federal government had left pest inspections to the states, each constrained to only the area within its borders. This patchwork system handicapped the federal government’s efforts to deal with outbreaks across state lines, or worse, maladies imported from abroad. An entomologist sees the world through the prism of insects, and everywhere Marlatt looked were examples of states spreading diseases while Washington sat, watched, and did nothing.

  This was the type of dread that motivated Marlatt for more than a decade. And in 1905, at exactly the point Marlatt and Fairchild were both rising in the circles of social Washington, attending the same parties and society meetings, the one crop they would clash over—the one that would come to be known around the world as the tree of Washington, D.C.—was slowly making its way toward America’s shores.

  * * *

  —

  After their wedding, David and Marian Fairchild decided they weren’t city people. They wanted space and some land, at least enough to have a garden of their own. Fairchild’s affinity for plants had rubbed off on his artistic-minded wife, and so, with the freedom of being a newlywed couple, and the windfall of a generous dowry from Mr. and Mrs. Bell, David and Marian bought a ten-acre patch of heavily wooded land just outside of Chevy Chase, Maryland. To help their daughter and new son-in-law sustain life in the suburbs, the Bells gifted them an automobile with an enchanting top speed of twelve miles per hour. Marian, who would later be employed as a wartime ambulance driver, became the first woman in Washington, D.C., granted a driver’s license.

  They both loved the property so much, they camped on the bare land the first day they owned it. “Like children, we waded in the brook, chased the squirrels and built a fire of twigs beneath the oaks,” Fairchild wrote. After they constructed a feeble wooden structure, their mornings were filled with the baking of chickpea muffins. With the extra garbanzos, Fairchild made soup.

  Finally, after all his travels, Fairchild had his own land, his own canvas to fill with the trees and shrubs that in all his travels had emerged as his favorites. He planted an entire bamboo garden and ordered rootstock from the foreign botanical offices he had visited. He imported ornamental trees from Europe, bitter Chinese melons, even the kudzu vine he had found in Japan, which took great effort to get to root, and then, when it smothered part of the garden, required even more energy to kill it.

  All Marian wanted, however, were Japanese flowering cherry trees, which she referred to simply as “cherry blossoms.” Fairchild ordered 125 of them from the Yokohama Nursery Company in Yokohama, where he had spent that recent resplendent summer. The nursery owner, a man named Uhei Suzuki, was so pleased to hear from Fairchild again—and to have an American customer—that he nearly gave away the trees for free, just ten cents
apiece.

  Six months later, in the spring of 1906, the trees showed their pink blossoms for the first time, and with them came buzz—the type of buzz, in days before major movie stars, that only horticulture could produce. Fairchild spent the early mornings walking amid the budding trees, their petals speckled with dew drops against the gray sky of dawn. He carried his camera, a new one that could magnify the blossoms, filling the full frame with the delicate beauty that had so taken him in Japan. Word of the Fairchilds’ exotic pink trees brought so many onlookers to their front yard that Fairchild ordered three hundred more as a gift to the city of Chevy Chase.

  The Yokohama Nursery Company was the only Japanese seller of sakura flowering cherry trees. The company’s catalogue in 1901 featured its premier product. Fairchild wrote directly to the owner of the company to order more than a hundred trees, his first of many orders that would lead to American demand for more.

  This was especially notable for a suburb of Washington. The capital city itself wasn’t terribly good-looking in the early twentieth century. The most impressive part of Washington was its design, its streets clean and angular, wide and efficient. But you couldn’t put a city plan on a postcard. Nor could one gloat about the new Washington Monument, impressive but clumsily placed. The Potomac lapped near the obelisk, encasing the area in a perennial field of mud. Thomas Nelson Page, the man married to Barbour Lathrop’s sister, gave a speech to the Washington Society of Fine Arts on May 4, 1910, calling for someone to do something to beautify Washington. “We are much given to claiming that Washington is now the most beautiful city in the country, and one of the most beautiful in the world; in fact we are much given to claiming that whatever we are, we are the ‘most’ of that,” he argued. “But if I may say so, without giving offense, this mental attitude, which is essentially that of the provincial who knows little of the standards by which comparison is made, is unworthy of a great people.”