by Daniel Stone
So, it was in the small town of Davao, not long after the expedition got under way, that Fairchild gawked at the eagle in the cage. While he watched its struggles, he may have considered how lucky he was to find himself again in the Indian Ocean, so many years after his first visit and still with the strength for a new adventure. He might have thought about all the wealthy benefactors he had found to fund his exploits, nearly all through happenstance meetings that yielded thrilling opportunities. He could have fixated on the notion that, amid a constantly shrinking and interconnected globe, there still remained plants undiscovered by the Western world. But most likely, even for an old man who had seen so much, an eagle that ate monkeys proved, yet again, the bizarre wonder of the tropics.
The Chêng Ho stopped in Sangihe, on an island a dozen miles wide with a four-thousand-foot volcano rising above the clouds. Children who may never have seen visitors squealed as they surrounded Marian and other members of the party. Fairchild wandered off to “botanize,” as he called it, to collect palms. The Malay he had learned in Java had rusted by now. With hand gestures and props from the boat, he convinced the islanders to show him their rarest palms, one deep red and another with a spineless trunk. He studied mangroves along the shore, their roots stretching to reach muddy soil. He watched a colony of weaver ants secrete silk from their glands and then pass it around to form a nest stronger than a man’s hands could rip.
More children, singing and chanting at the tops of their voices, awaited the boat as it pulled into Siau. The island was still smoking from an eruption and leaned to one side. Forty kids followed Fairchild as he collected seeds from one tree and shrub after another. He met the chief of the island, joyful at being called upon by an American. When the chief ate leaves of the papaya plant, Fairchild asked if he could take the chief’s picture when he was midbite. If people at home learned that faraway people ate papaya leaves—later shown to balance blood sugar, boost immunity, and even weaken cancer cells—they might try them, too. His cynicism about people’s stubborn tastes had grown strong. “I know there are many people who will shy at the idea of even tasting the leaves of the papaya,” Fairchild wrote of the encounter. “But as they shake their heads they will reach for a cigarette.”
Aside from the plant hunting, which continued at Fairchild’s now leisurely pace, the high point of the trip was when someone brought a coconut crab on board, alive with great weight. The women shrieked as Fairchild and the crew tried to train it backward into a jar. The animal complied, but only after its powerful pincers broke a mop handle in two. To preserve the creature, Fairchild filled the jar with formaldehyde.
The low point would come several months later when Ned Beckwith, the expedition’s photographer, was arrested, suspected of spying, perhaps for the Germans, or working for the Chinese, since the Chêng Ho had all the appearances of a Chinese boat. Dutch soldiers confiscated his camera and inspected his film.
“Wij zijn Amerikanen,” Fairchild insisted when he rescued Ned from the lockup. “We are Americans.” A cablegram from the Dutch East Indies’ capital, Batavia, confirmed this, and Ned’s captors allowed them to leave.
The expedition was supposed to last two years. But suspicion, danger, and animosity would cut it short. Holland wanted no part in a second world war, but after Germany invaded the Netherlands in May of 1940, Dutch soldiers feared the Germans would invade the East Indies next, so they began rounding up any Germans on the islands. They minded little about collateral damage, about apprehending a group of touring Americans hunting for, of all things, plants. As a courtesy, the Chêng Ho was ordered to leave the region, to return to the Philippines, and then America. Don’t stop, Dutch authorities warned, and don’t look back.
David Fairchild defied the order. The boat stopped at seventeen more islands, and on each one he shuffled slowly onto shore to snatch seeds of palms, fruits, and flowers. He moved as fast as his aging body would allow to evade arrest, yet was content to be moved by the currents. He instructed the captain of the Chêng Ho that they would take their time.
Epilogue
One day a few autumns ago, after several months of research, I decided it was time to meet David Fairchild. He’d been dead for sixty years, so I was really going to see the remnants of his work. Fairchild took his last breath under a Javanese ficus tree in his Florida garden one day in August of 1954, which seemed fitting for a man who had fallen so deeply in love with the tropics.
The better part of a century later, there’s a small army of people near Miami committed to keeping Fairchild’s legacy alive. Gardeners, archivists, geneticists, all of whom draw a paycheck from a nonprofit or government agency that wouldn’t exist had Fairchild not lived.
I spent days in a small room with taupe tile and a buzzing wall-unit air conditioner where boxes of Fairchild’s old letters were stacked to the ceiling. I visited the Kampong, the house that he and Marian had lived in, and stood in their bedroom—hoping to discover what? I didn’t know. I imagined Fairchild walking down the stairs and across a small breezeway to the kitchen, still with its original tile, and then I strolled out in his lush green backyard, now a venue for Miami weddings, and stopped to look at the view of Biscayne Bay that Fairchild enjoyed in the phase of his life when he simply sat and watched the lapping waves.
Somehow, though, I didn’t feel as if I had truly met Fairchild until I met Mike Winterstein. He asked me to meet him a few miles from the Kampong near an area blocked by a gate. About five and a half feet tall, Winterstein was the kind of USDA employee I had never seen in Washington—his bronze skin and calloused hands made me think he probably hadn’t put on a suit since sometime in the seventies. He talked fast and breathless, and when he heard I was poking around, he invited me to see the restricted USDA land where some of Fairchild’s old plants still grow.
“I’ll take you for a drive around the property,” he said. “You can see what it looked like when the man was here.”
We whirled around the orchard, taking such fast and sharp turns that it felt as if two wheels of our golf cart came off the ground. Twice I reminded Mike I wasn’t in a rush. Twice he assured me that he wasn’t, either. He pointed to trees planted in the middle of tall, thick grass. Most of them were mangoes. Each started as a sapling that Fairchild picked up in some corner of the world. Now some were more than fifty feet tall.
I couldn’t resist asking Winterstein what was the purpose of keeping alive such old trees when more contemporary mango trees now exist, the fruit’s production long ago outsourced abroad. Mangoes that once grew abundantly in Florida are now produced commercially in Mexico, Brazil, and India. And the avocados that helped build Southern California are now imported mostly from Mexico.
“These are the originals,” Winterstein said—or in other words, the primary colors. By now, Fairchild’s dates from Baghdad in 1903 have been mixed, crossbred, and hybridized millions of times, resulting in the dates in any American supermarket. Winterstein told me how chemists and fruit researchers still use the remnants of Fairchild’s old work with mangoes—and in a nice twist of diplomatic karma, it’s often foreign researchers who find the most value in the mangoes Fairchild brought to America from other countries. Winterstein explained, “If Israel, for example, is dealing with a pathogen in their commercial mango groves, we can send them clean material to use for evaluation plantings.” All of which makes Fairchild something of an originator. He could take credit for today’s dates and avocados the same way Alexander Graham Bell could claim credit for the iPhone, or Henry Ford for a Ferrari. One person makes a breakthrough, and then innovators make improvements.
Once I had this in mind, I started seeing Fairchild everywhere. On a trip to New York I saw an ad on the subway for a drink called Peachy Keen Nectarine (“with real fruit flavor!”). A high-end restaurant on Washington, D.C.’s Fourteenth Street featured a Meyer lemon salad. In the mornings, I often run around the tidal basin near the Washington Monument. It’s silent
most days, except during a two-week period each spring when crowds fill the area, kites fill the sky, and a man with a cart sells cherry blossom ice cream.
Fairchild’s legacy seemed to have tentacles everywhere, and after a while, my friends grew to expect it. When I’d stab some food item on my plate—a cashew, some kale, a nectarine—and say, “Guess who helped bring this to America,” they were at first impressed, but over time, they began to roll their eyes.
But Fairchild’s successes are only part of his legacy. He often explained to people that food introduction had two phases: bringing a food across an ocean, and then getting consumers to like it. The second phase was where thousands of crops fell apart. Things like the vegetable pear, also known as the chayote, just petered out, uninteresting to farmers and eaters. Same story with dasheens, uncharismatic root vegetables that couldn’t edge out potatoes, carrots, or even jicama for meaningful market share.
I spent months trying to find a mangosteen, the fruit of Southeast Asia that Fairchild considered his favorite. He was perplexed by why people didn’t see the magic he did, and disappointed until the day he died that mangosteens never caught on. Then one summer day my neighbor Wendy returned from New York with a grin.
“I found some” was all she said.
There in her kitchen, I tried for the first time the round, purple fruit. After one bite I understood why the mangosteen fizzled. It was delicious—sweet and creamy—but not cut out for long-distance travel. Its rind was too thick, its flesh too mealy, and it bruised too easily. When compared to today’s powerhouse crops like bananas, apples, and oranges, mangosteens have a weak résumé.
Too bad, really. Selecting which fruits live and die based on their market appeal seems to be a form of bioeconomic Darwinism. But that’s how agriculture works. And it has continued long after Fairchild’s era. A hundred years ago, American farmers grew 408 types of commercial tomatoes. Now the number has winnowed to 79. And 207 varieties of corn have become 12. Growing single crops at industrial scale ensures reliable food, but it also brings a greater chance of plant disease. And, if we’re being sentimental about it, just a loss of richness about the world.
Which returns me to the question I posed earlier, about whether there’s room in today’s world for another Fairchild. In all reality, the answer is probably no. The possibility of another food explorer leading an illustrious life seems to have been wiped away by the conveniences of globalization. Farmers now share crops, seeds, and tips at international conferences. I can take a webinar on how to grow the world’s best rice, and then buy seeds online. Keeping agricultural secrets is hard. A humble man stumbling on a new food that could reinvigorate America is nearly impossible in a world of multinational food companies whose jurisdiction is the entire planet. As with kale or quinoa, modern culinary spikes are usually the work of marketers, not explorers.
But it’d be hard to argue that the way we do food now isn’t overall a good thing. And on this point, I began to think that Fairchild would agree. I ended my search for Fairchild’s legacy on Okinawa, the small Japanese island near where Fairchild first saw the cherry blossom trees he’d bring to Washington, D.C. On my daily walks around my neighborhood, I passed a house that had a tree with perfectly pink cherry blossoms that, thanks to the temperate island weather, slowly opened over the course of my stay.
I figured it’d be nice to have those back home, or at least to give to some friends. So I decided I’d engage in the same sort of botanical espionage that Fairchild pioneered. I probably could have just asked the owner of the tree if I could take a small cutting, and she probably, out of sheer bewilderment, would have said yes. But I decided to do the most un-Japanese thing imaginable and steal them instead, if only to feel the adrenaline one time that Fairchild must have felt hundreds.
I procrastinated as long as possible, until the morning of my flight back to Washington. When I walked down the road with a pair of scissors, the woman who owned the tree was pruning her garden.
I hadn’t accounted for this, so I made two laps of the neighborhood while I considered my strategy. I lurked around a corner until I saw her disappear from view to the other side of the yard; then I walked briskly toward the tree. I slowed only slightly, and in one smooth arm motion, I cut three bud sticks from her cherry blossom tree, stuffed them in my pocket, and kept walking.
They made their way back to Washington in my suitcase, sealed in a plastic bag with wet paper towels—the closest I could come to Fairchild’s method of using damp moss. Forty hours later—lightning fast by any nineteenth-century standard—I had them in my kitchen. I dipped each cutting in a rooting hormone I keep on hand for botanical emergencies, and then stuffed each cutting in a raw potato. I felt satisfied that I had done everything right, and had benefited from modern travel and climate control. Fairchild would be impressed.
And yet, two weeks later, right as the buds might have grown new roots, when I might feel the triumph of successfully moving plant material from one continent to another, the cuttings began to dry out. The blossoms began to flake, and eventually, the flakes fell off.
I’m no botanist, so perhaps my failure can be excused. But the whole exercise seemed to accentuate the accomplishments of a man who did this work a century prior, without the conveniences of modern life.
There’s now about as much life in the cuttings as there is on the moon, but I can’t muster the courage to throw them away. I don’t like looking at dead sticks any more than I like ending this book talking about them. But each morning when I eat breakfast next to them, I sense something poetic that Fairchild might have felt. Botany is sometimes the disappointment of dead sticks. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, it’s the art of life, growth, and transformation.
California, 1919. Barbour Lathrop and David Fairchild.
David Fairchild introduced thousands of crops to American farmers. These watercolors, commissioned between 1899 and 1919 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, portray new fruits that had come into, or were newly growing in, the United States, as a result of Fairchild and other food explorers.
Citrus medica, Corsican citron
Anacardium occidentale, cashew nut
Carica papaya, papaya
Garcinia mangostana, mangosteen
Persea americana, avocado
Vitis vinifera, grape
Mangifera indica, mango
Citrullus lanatus, watermelon
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My first and most meaningful thanks is to those who farm. To grow food is to power humanity, and I salute those who do.
The day I met David Fairchild was a little like walking up to a fertile field of dirt at the beginning of spring. My visionary agent, Lauren Sharp, encouraged me to dig, and my sharp and thoughtful editor, Brent Howard, took a chance on the seeds I planted. The soil was rich because Fairchild had the foresight to write things down. I have many times wondered what I’d say to the man. I’d start by thanking him for the trail of bread crumbs.
This project wouldn’t have grown legs without Fairchild’s living grandchildren—Helene Pancoast, Hugh Muller, David Muller, Marian Weissman, Sally Shankman, Barbara Bates, David Fairchild, and Alice Bell Fairchild—and his great-nephew Gil Grosvenor, and his granddaughters-in-law Jeanne Muller and Katharine Muller, who all offered their time, kindness, and hospitality. Nancy Korber was the modern guardian of Fairchild’s legacy as archivist at the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden before she passed the baton to Arielle Simon. Marianne Swan and Mary Jo Robertson are the unsung heroes who archived Fairchild’s thirteen-thousand-and-counting photographs and guided me through them. My friend and talented photo editor Jessie Wender helped curate the best ones. David Lee gave context to Fairchild’s agricultural exploits. And I’d have found much less about Fairchild’s home, the Kampong, without David Jones. If this book moves you to care about plants, you might visit (or donate to) the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral
Gables, Florida, the National Tropical Botanical Garden in Kalaheo, Kauai, or your local botanical garden or gardening club.
I picked up bushels of agriculture lore thanks to Sara Lee, Susan Fugate, Rachel Donahue, Diane Wunsch, and the long line of librarians before them at the National Agricultural Library, as well as Melanie Harrison with the Agricultural Research Service. There’s no bigger public treasure than the Library of Congress, where David Mao, Liz Morrison, and Stephanie Marcus showed extraordinary capability and kindness. Connie Carter, unofficial queen of America’s public archives, did all that and baked cookies for my research sessions.
Mike Litterst at the National Park Service offered a tour through cherry blossom history, Kirk Huffman walked me delicately through Fijian cannibalism, and Sarah Seekatz nerded out with me about dates. Mike Winterstein at the USDA plied me with more mango lore (and mangoes) than I could digest, Peter Raven at the Missouri Botanical Garden offered a precise and concise botanical history of Earth, Tom Gradziel at UC Davis helped navigate thorny questions of botanical nomenclature, and Kazuo Ariyoshi of the Yokohama Nursery Company patiently answered, in English, my endless questions about Japanese sakura trees. I should say so bluntly: I consulted many sources, but I offer a special salute to prior scholars of plant hunting, among them Amanda Harris, Philip Pauly, and Marjory Stoneman Douglas.