Pawpaw

by Andrew Moore

  Because he was working in the shaded forest, Neal gardened almost exclusively with native plants and wildflowers. “I loved tramping through the woods,” he says. “It became a pastime and a passion to learn the flowers, to get books on this, learn to identify all the trees.” Nature became a comfort during the malaise of his teenage years. He shared a bedroom with his brother, but, “I can go off to the woods, and I’m alone,” he recalls. “And it’s beautiful to boot. I feel really at home.”

  Colleen Anderson, a friend of forty years, met Neal while both were in their early twenties, a few years before his pawpaw conversion moment. What began with violets had by this time bloomed into a broad love of the natural world. Anderson remembers the charming young Neal as an avid outdoorsman. “One of the things I loved about Neal was he knew everything about plants,” she says. “So going for a walk with him you learned a lot.” And when he wasn’t in the woods, Neal developed a love for theater, classical music, and poetry.

  Neal spent three and a half years at the University of Chicago, but finished his undergraduate degree in agriculture at West Virginia University. But it was while working on a master’s in plant genetics at WVU that Neal’s life would be set on a new course.

  The year was 1975. Neal was in the floodplain of the Monongahela River in Morgantown. It was September, and he was a lab instructor for an ecology class, teaching students how to estimate the size of animal populations. There were pawpaw trees throughout the woods and, it being September, the fruit was ripe. The forest was fragrant. A friend, who had recently completed hiking the Appalachian Trail, was staying with Neal at that time. The friend returned with an enthusiasm for foraging. Further, a broader wild edibles movement, sparked by Euell Gibbons’s book Stalking the Wild Asparagus, had put pawpaws back on Neal’s radar as something that could be eaten, and not just thrown. He recalls that “the scent was in the air.” But surrounded by his students, he felt he shouldn’t be eating wild fruit. It wouldn’t have been professional. When he returned later that week, though, the singular experience would change his life.

  The ripest fruit were already on the ground. Neal picked one up and broke it apart. “I ate it, and it was just an epiphany, a revelation.” He thought of the wild edibles in Gibbons’s book—like jack-in-the-pulpit, which, if not boiled repeatedly, can kill you—as merely survival food. “[Pawpaws] just didn’t compare,” he says. Pawpaws weren’t the fare of last resort; they were a luscious dessert.

  As a scientist, Neal immediately began to wonder: What were the earliest wild oranges like, or peaches in the forests of China—were those fruits even half this promising? They must have been good, or else the ancient plantsmen wouldn’t have bothered. But for comparison, a wild peach is a tiny bit of flesh surrounding a large pit. And wild apples are just a fraction of the size of our cultivated fruits. With thousands of years of breeding, look what they’ve become. But the wild pawpaw Neal had just eaten was already large and filled with sweet, edible pulp. “What if pawpaw, instead of being in the wild today, had three thousand years ago the same sort of breeding?” Neal says. If this is the beginning for pawpaw, he wonders, where can it lead? “Just blows your mind,” he says.

  Neal was taken, to say the least. Colleen Anderson says she can’t remember the first time Neal told her about his discovery, and that she probably didn’t take it too seriously at the time. “But of course, one of the things you know about him,” she says, “is that he didn’t stop talking about pawpaws.”

  After that day along the Monongahela, Neal was left with an endless list of questions. Was anyone growing and breeding pawpaws? He couldn’t recall ever seeing varieties offered in catalogs. None of his acquaintances—beyond the pages of Euell Gibbons—had any information on pawpaws. Had they ever been selected and bred? As a young student, Neal’s teachers inculcated in him that all research starts at the library. And so if he wasn’t completely hooked on pawpaws that day in the bottoms, his commitment would soon be sealed with a little time in the stacks.

  One of the first items he came across was the Journal of Heredity’s 1916 contest, which occurred at a time “when America was still close to the woods and the wild,” Neal says. “People had been in the woods for centuries, and since pawpaws are long-lived, particularly as a patch, the reputation spreads and locally people tell one another, and a certain patch is well known as being really good. Even in some cases I think knowledge would have been transmitted from Indians, because that was part of their whole livelihood.” He then adds, “When there were good relations.” All of this, to Neal’s mind, meant that the fruit from the 1916 contest contained centuries’ worth of exceptional genetic material. It was as exciting as the fruit itself.

  While at WVU, Neal bought a small farmstead in Webster County, a remote place in the middle of the Mountain State. He was inspired by the back-to-the-land movement and by his love for nature and agriculture. The farm was beautiful, he admits, but not practical. He could practice subsistence farming there but would likely live in poverty. The property demonstrated to Neal, as much as his education, the reality of farming in Appalachia and the difficulties of making a robust living. “By the end of my senior year I’m thinking, What could I do to be of assistance to Appalachia, my home state? It was my upbringing in both my family and the nature of my town that one contributes, and doesn’t just live for oneself alone,” Neal says. “There’s a lot of poverty in this region of Appalachia. And it becomes more and more clear that it’s not essentially a physical, technological problem in the region; it has more to do with economics and the relationship with people to the land.” So Neal decided to do further graduate work at Michigan State University, in agricultural economics. Perhaps he could solve problems at a macro level, he thought. Meanwhile, his interest in pawpaws did not abate. In the back of his mind, he believed that pawpaws could also benefit small farmers in Appalachia, that the forgotten tree, native to West Virginia’s hillsides and hollers, could be a high-value crop. Its potential not just as a natural specimen, but as a fruit of economic value to people, was waiting to be tapped.

  “I was interested in what could I do with my life that would be useful,” Neal says. “Not that everyone would agree to domesticate the pawpaw is a need—of course they wouldn’t—but I looked at it and said it’s a species with incredible potential, therefore it should be utilized. There was a certain pathos to it, I thought, that the naturally occurring resources of North America have not been exploited—in a good way, to a good purpose—in the way that the resources of Asia, Europe, Africa, and South America have been. But there’s nobody there to take up the cause and make it happen.”

  What Neal envisioned was a large scientific breeding experiment, as advocated by James A. Little in 1905, and the Journal of Heredity in 1916. “I know my own abilities,” Neal recalls, “I said, ‘I can do this.’” Despite not having the land (he had by this time sold his property in Pendleton County)—and lacking backing from any university or private firm—Neal decided to attempt what had so far eluded other American plantsmen: to breed the wild pawpaw.

  The logical first step was to gather the best pawpaws available. “But you look and find that after 1950 or so, it’s just gone,” Neal says. It meaning many things: the folk knowledge of particularly good patches, as well as the patches themselves, with land having increasingly been cleared and developed. Also, interest. There were at least forty named cultivars available in the first half of the twentieth century, but only two of those had survived. Corwin Davis held a contest in 1950, yet few discoveries were made (he and a few others had, however, selected quality fruit from the wild over the years, and many of those cultivars are still highly regarded). In general, pawpaws seemed to have been left behind, as much a relic of the old county life as gristmills and muscadine wine. If the wild patches were largely forgotten, it seemed futile then to conduct yet another contest. Neal did some exploration of the woods, but how many pawpaw trees, in how many counties, in ho
w many states, could one man explore?

  Neal returned to the library. He pored through publications of the Northern Nut Growers Association, the California Rare Fruit Growers, and the North American Fruit Explorers, searching for the identities of the last century’s pawpaw growers, and the locations where collections might still exist. The task was clear: travel to Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, and track down the lost cultivars of the 1916 contest.

  Benjamin Buckman was an important horticulturalist who, between 1900 and 1920, approximately, collected and experimented with pawpaws, among other fruits and nuts, in Farmingdale, Illinois. His orchard contained 1,743 varieties of more than twenty species of plants, and he is noted for introducing the Farmingdale pear rootstock. Working independently of the 1916 contest, he collected twelve named varieties of pawpaw, receiving fruit and seed from Arkansas, Indiana, West Virginia, Ohio, and his home state, Illinois. No one else had a collection like this.1

  When Neal arrived at the former Buckman estate in 1981, which was surrounded by miles upon miles of corn and soybean fields, there were no orchards. In a small patch of woods beyond the home and its adjacent yard, though, he found a number of pawpaw trees. Neal hoped these trees would have been the offspring, or root suckers even, of material Buckman had collected. But the fruit was disappointing—in size, in flavor, in all respects. Not that Neal was yet a pawpaw connoisseur, but Buckman’s collection was supposed to have been exceptional, and nothing here was better than the typical, wild fruit Neal had already tasted.

  Buckman’s farm once held a collection of some of the world’s best apples and pears, peaches, plums, pecans, hickories, pawpaws, and persimmons, but they were all gone. In their place, more soybeans, more corn.

  Still, George A. Zimmerman’s Fernwood held more promise. To find the home, Neal first went to the courthouse in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and after several hours found a copy of Zimmerman’s deed, and eventually its place on the map. Near Piketown, Pennsylvania, Zimmerman’s former estate was set back along a private drive, far from the road and nestled among rhododendron and pawpaws, under a shady canopy of oaks and maples. The home, built from Pennsylvania’s indigenous limestone and surrounded by nature, appeared frozen in time. Throughout these grounds Zimmerman had propagated and collected more than sixty named varieties. He experimented with hybridizing pawpaw with Annona squamosa and A. atemoya—two of the pawpaw’s tropical cousins—though was ultimately unsuccessful. He was, however, the first horticulturalist to successfully cross Asimina triloba with four of the subspecies found in Florida: obovata, reticulata, longifolia, and incana. As a member of the Northern Nut Growers Association—an organization that had been studying and reporting on pawpaws since 1911—his piece of land was, as a successor to Buckman’s, the era’s greatest repository of pawpaw information. Neal was hoping even a glimmer of that potential had survived.2

  Zimmerman wrote that a dozen or so of his collected varieties were of special merit, and some of his finest specimens came from Buckman’s collection. The standout pawpaws Neal hoped to find included Fairchild, Ketter (the contest winner), Hope’s August, Long John, Taylor, Osborne, Buckman, and Martin. But there were no labeled trees on the property, and none of the fruit was impressive. Yet one fruit, picked from a tree across the road, in the pigpen of a neighbor’s yard, did stand out. “[It] had one of the most complex, intriguing flavors I’ve ever tasted,” Neal recalls. “It sparkled almost.” Neal collected seeds from this tree to be planted as part of his breeding program. But nothing else at the Fernwood seemed special. Zimmerman’s collection appeared gone.

  Fortunately, however, in 19413 Zimmerman’s widow donated to the Blandy Experimental Farm in Virginia a portion of the pawpaw collection, including four controlled crosses of Ketter, Buckman, and Taylor.4 It was Neal’s last chance to reach 1916.

  On another sunny winter morning, Neal and I walk the grounds of the former Blandy Experimental Farm—now the State Arboretum of Virginia—as he tells me the story of his final efforts to recover Zimmerman’s collection. Though it’s cold, and most trees leafless, the plants appear to come to life when Neal speaks of their pedigrees, of mothers and daughters, parents and offspring.

  In 1980, when Neal arrived at the Blandy office, he inquired about the pawpaw collection. Yes, he was told, there were some trees right beyond the offices along a short stone wall. Orland White, Blandy’s director from 1926 to 1955, was interested in pawpaws from the beginning. It’s why Zimmerman’s collection was brought here. Behind the office then Neal found five trees. The oldest, Neal later learned, was Fairchild No. 2, a daughter of the Fairchild cultivar planted by White in 1926. It drew a line all the way back to Ketter, the prizewinning fruit. Had he known then, Neal would have collected fruit or taken cuttings (however, the diminutive tree he shows me this day is not Fairchild No. 2 but a root sucker of some other tree).

  But five trees was not a collection. By 1980, several decades after Orland White’s departure, Blandy’s staff had no great interest in pawpaws; apparently that had died with White. Neal pushed them for more information. Was there more? Yes, they replied, perhaps in the backwoods there were some pawpaws, planted years ago for some kind of experiment.

  Neal walked down a gravel lane, past oaks, maples, and ginkgos. When he came to the backwoods, he saw small pawpaws in the understory, below the eighty-foot oaks and other hardwoods. Most were small and skinny. But he was not after wild fruit. Avoiding poison ivy, trying to make sense of the woods, he noticed English ivy. As a non-native, it indicated the presence of people. He noticed a thick, tall pawpaw tree. And then another. And another. He took another step, and the tallest trees came into order, forming a straight line. Though they were towered over by oaks and encroached upon by suckers, they clearly stood out. “Humans planted this. This is a collection now,” Neal said. Thirty feet farther in, a second, parallel row appeared. He hadn’t yet tasted the fruit but was certain: This planting was a collection, and possibly contained the lost Zimmerman material, a repository dating back to Benjamin Buckman, back to the 1916 contest and the turn of the century.

  Neal returned to Blandy in September to analyze and collect fruit. There was no guarantee that the quality would be any better than what he’d found in Farmingdale or Piketown, but he was not let down. The material here was truly exceptional. Ever meticulous and organized, Neal put labels on every tree believed to have belonged to the collection (on our December visit, we find one metal tag, its identifier barely legible, nailed to the tree he’d selected more than twenty years ago). He took notes on each tree’s fruit. One tree in particular, BEF-53, really impressed Neal. Not only was its fruit the biggest he’d ever encountered, but it was very round and fleshy. “Which is, of course, what I already knew that I was going to be breeding for.”

  Neal thought the collection was not grafted, but rather a seedling repository. Which was a blessing, because grafted material would have likely succumbed from the neglect and passage of time, as it had at Buckman’s and the Fernwood. But there was no risk of this with seedlings, trees growing on their own roots whose suckers would be replicas of the original.

  Neal was disappointed in Blandy’s organization: files, particularly those relating to pawpaws, were amassed in a closet with no apparent order. He wished to have known the origin of each seedling—in addition to Zimmerman’s collection, White received material from states including Alabama, Indiana, Maryland, New York, and Tennessee—but the records didn’t indicate where any particular acquisition was planted. “As scientists [the plantings] must have been material that they thought was superior,” Neal says. “In its own right it was some sort of a breeding experiment.” Which, frustrations aside, is precisely what Neal had been looking for: superior pawpaw genes, alive in this oak understory, waiting for several decades. His job now was to get them out of the woods.

  In 1980 Neal took a job with the USDA’s Economic Research Service, in Washington, DC. “Part of my inter
est in going to DC for work,” he says, laughing at the memory, “was that it would be close to this previous pawpaw activity”: the Blandy Experimental Farm, the Fernwood, and David Fairchild’s former home in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Like the earliest Americans centuries ago, Neal was co-evolving with the pawpaw.

  Neal didn’t waste time. He had already begun growing seedling pawpaws in a greenhouse, and in April 1981 his first eight-hundred-tree pawpaw orchard was in the ground. They were grown from seeds Neal collected at Blandy, Zimmerman’s Fernwood, a wild patch in Paint Branch, Maryland, and from seeds shared by the previous generation of pawpaw experimenters, including Corwin Davis. In taste and appearance, this material comprised the best pawpaws known to the nation.

  That Neal would make even this much headway with an experimental orchard was never a sure bet, especially considering two key factors: He was not a plant breeder by profession, and he didn’t own land. This first orchard was planted at the University of Maryland Wye Research and Education Center under the auspices of Professor Harry Schwartz, who allowed Neal to use a portion of the Wye’s unused land for his pawpaw breeding.

  “Neal is a very charming person,” says Colleen Anderson. She, herself, was convinced to join Neal’s PawPaw Foundation a few years later and served on its board. “He’s the kind of person that you will go out of your way to be around.” And evidently, the type of person you would loan land to. Neal has managed to do this time and again, beginning at the Wye, later in Keedysville, Maryland; on the farm of Bill Mackintosh, in Virginia; and most recently at the West Virginia University’s Kearneysville Tree Fruit Research and Education Center. His borrowing of land is more fodder for Johnny Appleseed comparisons: Wherever Neal could acquire land, a pawpaw orchard would sprout.