The Food Explorer

by Daniel Stone

  Of course the trees had to be burned, Ozaki said. And if President Taft would still entertain the exchange, Japan would like to send over another shipment of trees immediately. Better trees this time, packed by experts.

  No one felt happy about the course of events, but it surprised American officials how deferential and apologetic Japan had been in response. One could have easily interpreted this deference from Japan, long proud and polite, as a sign of America’s stature, an admission that Japan needed America’s respect more than America needed Japan’s. Mayor Ozaki’s wife, in a fawning letter to Helen Taft, apologized again for the mishap and then characterized the second shipment of trees as a “memorial of national friendship between the United States and Japan.”

  Gardeners and chemists from several of Japan’s islands were brought to Tokyo to help select another batch of sakura, the expectations higher this time to get it right. A famous Japanese chemist named Jokichi Takamine was tapped to oversee the process and was told the second shipment could not be mishandled. Three thousand and twenty trees for Washington were selected as an insurance policy, and to hold them, a bigger boat that could cross the Pacific faster. The trees were raised in virgin sod, and their roots wrapped in damp moss. The trees were fumigated twice with hydrocyanic acid gas to asphyxiate any insects, and then placed in cold storage to slow the trees’ metabolism.

  Charles Marlatt wasn’t pleased upon hearing of a second shipment. But he considered it a small victory that the first shipment, with its faults on display to the public, had proved his point. Biological imports couldn’t be left to chance. The incident had successfully undermined the pipe dream that everything that showed up on America’s shores would come exclusively with benefits, and no risk.

  Fairchild, too, had been encouraged by the arrival of the second shipment and the verdict, after they received a “minute and careful examination,” that the trees were clean, young, and healthy.

  Four years to the day after Fairchild’s 1908 gift of the trees to Washington’s schools, on March 27, 1912, Mrs. Taft broke dirt during a private ceremony in West Potomac Park near the banks of the Potomac River. The wife of the Japanese ambassador was invited to plant the second tree. Eliza Scidmore and David Fairchild took shovels not long after. The 3,020 trees were more than could fit around the tidal basin. Gardeners planted extras on the White House grounds, in Rock Creek Park, and near the corner of Seventeenth and B streets close to the new headquarters of the American Red Cross. It took only two springs for the trees to become universally adored, at least enough for the American government to feel the itch to reciprocate. No American tree could rival the delicate glamour of the sakura, but officials decided to offer Japan the next best thing, a shipment of flowering dogwoods, native to the United States, with bright white blooms.

  Meanwhile, the cherry blossoms in Washington would endure for over one hundred years, each tree replaced by clones and cuttings every quarter century to keep them spry. As the trees grew, so did a cottage industry around them: an elite group of gardeners, a team to manage their public relations, and weather-monitoring officials to forecast “peak bloom”—an occasion around which tourists would be encouraged to plan their visits. Eventually, cuttings from the original Washington, D.C., trees would also make their way to other American cities with hospitable climates. Denver, Colorado; Birmingham, Alabama; Saint Paul, Minnesota.

  Considering the trees were at first rejected and then accepted, Marlatt and Fairchild both had grounds to claim an element of victory. But the philosophical clash between them would grow bigger. The fight between men who had started as boyhood friends would wind up winner-take-all, the victor to define whether America would embrace the unknowns of the world or run fearful from them for the entire century to come.

  PART IV

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Urge to Walk

  Being a husband delighted Fairchild. Marian never tired of asking questions about his travels and botanical interests, and either genuinely or out of wifely duty, she adopted Fairchild’s boyhood fascination with Java. The two would have a son together in 1906, Alexander Graham Bell Fairchild, who later in life joked that David’s vow to take Marian to Java was the only reason she married him.

  The domestic harmony, however, came at a cost. In just three years Fairchild had transformed from bachelor to husband to father, and with the obligations came restrictions on his travel. In the days after Fairchild had cabled word of his marriage, Lathrop, in Egypt, responded with a lengthy letter conveying a measure of resigned congratulations from an old stag. He seemed to see Fairchild’s happiness as his own, and at fifty-seven, he watched his protégé acquire something that, either by choice or by fate, he had never been able to.

  Despite his inexperience, Lathrop couldn’t help but offer advice for marriage, revealing that he fancied the idea of being a superior husband and imagined, in another life, the type of spouse he’d be.

  Shepheard’s Hotel, Cairo

  March 18th, 1905

  My dear boy—

  Your letter telling of your hope—or yearning rather, reached me three days ago—the cablegram arrived last night—telling me of your happiness.

  After dancing around the room, in a highly undignified manner for one of my years—and giving several cow-boy whoops, I immediately cabled you. . . .

  I am made happy in the belief that you have found a woman whose tastes will agree with yours—and that the two of you will be better mated than single. You have an honest, affectionate nature—but to your credit be it said, woman is even more of a mystery to you than to a mere worldling like myself. Your years of hermiting left you a more earnest man but also a more ignorant one. . . . So take heed to this advice from a battered old bachelor, one who, as you know, holds good women in the highest respect. Don’t bore your lady love to a too incessant attention. Give the other men a chance—and she will enjoy your talk all the more after their empty prattle.

  Don’t be stilted in writing or speech with her—naturally you write an excellent letter and talk intelligently and entertainingly—but when you put on social frills you are a failure. Your education and association have been on thinking lines. When you leave those you are very apt to flounder—where a city ass would gaily prance along. God forbid you should talk to anyone on scientific subjects only—but don’t try to be kittenish. Few women can stand a dullard—but not one worth knowing can long care for a man who tries to appear what he isn’t . . .

  So my advice to each one of two experimenters in the marriage game can practically be summed up as follows—

  Be natural—but not insistent.

  Be more anxious to give than to take.

  Be comrades.

  . . . You ought to be a married man, and I am delighted to learn that all the chances for a happy life are in your favor. God bless you, boy . . .

  My one regret is—no more tramps together.

  Yours affectionately,

  Barbour Lathrop

  The poignant letter with exceptional honesty betrayed the depth of Lathrop’s affection. And yet, of all Lathrop had written, the last line held the greatest weight, the indelible mark of something irreversible.

  Indeed, the tether of an early-twentieth-century marriage effectively clipped Fairchild’s wings. He had become like a shipwrecked boat, happy in its location but immobile nonetheless. While this normally wouldn’t be a problem in bigger government offices with a diversity of ages, Fairchild wasn’t only the head of the Office of Seed and Plant Introduction; he was the brains and thrust behind the entire operation. For more than seven years his travels and shipments had brought the largest quantity of new fruits, flowers, trees, and shrubs to America. He had spent years arguing that plant hunting was important work. Now, anchored, he needed more people to do it.

  Three men were already on assignment for the Department, one looking for alfalfas in Russia, another for dates and olives in the
Mediterranean, and the third in Cuba hunting the best tobacco on earth. The Strand, a monthly magazine famous for being the first to publish Arthur Conan Doyle’s mystery stories, would put Fairchild’s team on equal footing with Sherlock Holmes, calling them “envoys of agriculture.” But Fairchild was unmoved by breathless reports. He knew from experience that what all three men lacked was the burning curiosity for newness, the instinct to feel around in the dark and stumble headlong toward the unknown.

  Sitting in his office day after day, Fairchild fixated on China, a land still full of hidden treasure that no Westerner had fully explored. His written inquiries to botanical authorities there were misunderstood or ignored. One letter from an Irish friend of Lathrop’s living in Szechuan contained the unhelpful advice, “Don’t waste time and postage; send a man.”

  A younger Fairchild, the one who bumbled through Corsica on a shoestring, might have gone himself, unaware of the risk and willing to confront challenges. But that was before he was married, and before he had been spoiled by Lathropian luxury.

  Who else was suited for such dangerous work?

  “He’s a strange fellow,” said one of Fairchild’s assistants one day. “A bit erratic perhaps, for he doesn’t seem to care about staying in one place.”

  The man under discussion was Frank Meyer, a Dutchman working in the Department’s greenhouses, who seemed antsy and unfocused, as though yearning for an adventure—a man qualified, if not perfect, for the open position of China explorer.

  Frank Meyer was indeed spirited and peculiar. He had gravitated toward horticulture out of childhood curiosity. He was also idealistic: he grew up in an aspiring utopian society modeled after Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. Before coming to America in 1901 he had been the assistant of the renowned Dutch geneticist Hugo de Vries, who had first published the theory of “genes.”

  Yet Meyer was also impatient. After he had immigrated at age twenty-five, he planted trees at the Missouri Botanical Garden, propagated saplings at an experiment station in California, and then worked as a junior gardener for the USDA in Washington, D.C. At each job he became so restless being stationary that he eventually quit.

  Meyer had an obsessive lust for plants. At the age of twelve, when his parents had asked what he wanted to do when he grew up, he said he wanted to travel the world studying edible plants. His father replied that they were too poor for him to study science, so he had better learn something practical, like making musical instruments.

  Meyer left Holland to escape this fate. He wanted to touch and taste trees and shrubs, to subject every plant to his senses. His feelings bordered on familial: he looked at plants with compassion, patience, and a sense of devoted affection. This oddity, one that most people would have dismissed as the quirk of an uncultured man, deeply impressed Fairchild as the unteachable skill required for discerning among plants. “It was a characteristic sight to see Meyer quickly pick off and chew a fragment of a dried plant,” Fairchild observed, “or smell furiously some plant material in order to bring to bear on it all of the powers of his remarkable memory.”

  Curious to size up a man hungry for discovery and adventure, Fairchild invited Meyer for an interview. He came sweating so profusely, his clothes were soaked through. Withholding judgment, Fairchild noted, “His eager face was sparkling with the real light of a born traveler.”

  Meyer’s credentials were sterling even in a field occupied by few. But there was something eccentric about him. He sat with eyes wide open, transfixed on the wall behind Fairchild. He asked questions in deep, Dutch-inflected speech and then answered them, like a one-sided interview. “What don’t we know of the world, well there is so much,” Meyer said quizzically. His mastery of plants was savantlike.

  1905. Fairchild immediately liked everything about Frank Meyer (pictured)—his love of walking, his compulsion for collecting plants, his apathy toward danger—and found him perfectly suited for long and treacherous travel in China, alone and on foot.

  And an even more remarkable and valuable characteristic: he loved to walk. Several days before his meeting with Fairchild, Meyer had walked to Mount Vernon, twenty miles south of Washington. He had once walked across the Alps to explore orange groves in Italy, and had marched hundreds of miles across Mexico. Now, if given the chance, he wanted to walk across China, a territory known to have so few roads, the only way to cross it was on foot. “Better small and fine than large and coarse,” he would say about crossing China, even if no one quite knew what that meant.

  Here was a man perfect for the task. A botanical explorer uninterested in money, glory, or luxury, who would march across one of Earth’s most dangerous but botanically rich regions.

  If Meyer wasn’t qualified for Fairchild’s roster, there wasn’t a man alive who was.

  The first question was how to introduce Meyer to Marian and Marian’s famous parents, the Bells. Fairchild took Meyer shopping and bought him a green dinner jacket. The Bells loved him immediately. Never mind his wafting body odor, or scruffy cheeks, or his aversion to eye contact, or his tendency to become unfocused by lengthy tangents; in an instant, Alexander Graham Bell could tell that Meyer was endlessly interested in learning. That alone made a man worth knowing.

  * * *

  —

  Meyer left on his first trip on July 27, 1905, with papers to remain in China for three years. Red tape and bureaucratic obstacles had become so arduous that Fairchild might have called off Meyer’s mission, if not for the agricultural largesse Fairchild knew would be waiting in the faraway country’s interior. The same way Egypt offered the most advanced farming methods, central Asia promised actual crops that had benefited from several thousand years of human selection to work out kinks.

  At Fairchild’s request, Meyer’s first assignment upon arriving in Peking, the city one day to be known as Beijing, was to find the grindstone persimmon, a swollen seedless variety, which Fairchild remembered from his own initial visit to southern China, that “makes its appearance on the Peking market and has become a favorite with many Europeans there.” After that, Meyer was to follow the wind, guided by only his taste and intuition.

  Meyer met Charles Marlatt one time before he left—in passing and in a hurry. The same instinct that gave Fairchild confidence in Meyer’s capability filled Marlatt with suspicion. Not only was Meyer, a Dutchman, a living embodiment of untested foreign things in the United States; he was going to a region festering with the unknown. The same plants Fairchild had called “plant immigrants” Marlatt called “plant enemies.” To Marlatt, Meyer was like a spy crossing enemy lines in an oblivious act of betrayal.

  Marlatt couldn’t stop Meyer’s trip. The Bureau of Entomology that he oversaw didn’t have the jurisdiction. Nor, in 1905, could he have put up bureaucratic roadblocks for all imported plant material. Marlatt did, however, decide to turn his outrage over Fairchild’s recklessness into action. And as Meyer prepared to depart the country for a long voyage across the Pacific, Marlatt began to formulate his plan to make sure people like Meyer wouldn’t be able to contaminate the homeland with his and Fairchild’s fanciful delusions of biological harmony.

  This animosity was lost on Meyer, who instead found himself showered with excitement and praise. The Washington Post would splash Meyer on the front page, calling him “the Agricultural Department’s Christopher Columbus.” The Los Angeles Times began a long-running series on the dangers facing Meyer—“Chinese outlaws, murderous thieves, rampant disease.” “This is what agricultural explorers are doing,” the paper wrote. “Going to all parts of the world in search of new and hardier varieties of grapes, grains, alfalfas, and all other products of the soil which might be imported to America and add to our farm and orchard wealth.”

  The reports of Meyer’s bravery (and later his heroism) were clearly embellished, but even Fairchild, the seasoned plant explorer, knew little of what Meyer might confront. Both of Fairchild’s stints in Canton had be
en in luxury; he had stayed in Western hotels and ridden in wicker chairs on men’s shoulders. Meyer carried only papers to confirm his identity and enough money for food and postage. He brought a chunk of silver to shave off for bribes, along with chemicals for preserving seed, drugs in case of illness, and several surgical instruments. “In these trips a man must be his own doctor, preacher, and devil,” the Post reporter wrote prophetically.

  This treacherous solitude is what Meyer craved most. “I am pessimistic by nature,” he had once told his friends. “I withdraw from humanity and try to find relaxation with plants.” Now the moment had come to feed his recluse spirit.

  A pessimistic Meyer looked optimistically over the rails of his steamer bound for China. Just days before he left, Meyer had written his family in Holland how lucky he was to get such “a beautiful job.” He wrote to Fairchild that he was committed to “do all I can to enrich the United States of America with things good for her people.”

  And so, when the ship reached Shanghai, Meyer wanted nothing more than to pick a direction, and walk.

  * * *

  —

  Three years had passed since Fairchild last occupied the cabin of an ocean liner with Barbour Lathrop. Their tour around Africa had been their last together. When Fairchild returned to America and entered a new phase of life, Lathrop lost his rudder, the person who gave purpose to his constant motion. Lonely and anxious, he simply continued globe-trotting in luxury. For what he knew, it was all he was good at.