by Andrew Moore
Kentucky’s, like all state fairs, celebrates the best: quilts, cows, pies, most ridiculous-looking pigeon, and so on. These pawpaws are no exception: skin unblemished, smooth and round, large, and colored a bright lime green. Their shade is nearly uniform: green, but with an undercurrent of pale yellow. If you’re accustomed to wild pawpaws, you might mistake these for something else altogether. Yet these are the same pawpaws eaten by the region’s Shawnee, Cherokee, Yuchi, and Chickasaw, by Daniel Boone and the frontier’s earliest settlers. Only, again, these are the best. In fact, when Brett Callaway planted the first orchard at Kentucky State University, he did it with seeds from the previous year’s state-fair exhibit.
There’s a clear blue-ribbon winner, not for taste, but for size: a submission by Jim Busch of his PA-Golden cultivar. Busch’s entry consists of five fruits arranged on a paper plate; the largest is at least the size of an oblong softball. I want to sample a bit—to chomp into the big one—but that would certainly be frowned upon. Still, I’m willing to bet it would not be the first time someone had to leave the fair for eating an entry.
Many of the fairgoers I speak with are familiar with pawpaws, but others see the fruit for the first time and ask, “So that’s a pawpaw?” For as long as they’ve appeared at the state fair—and for as long as people have eaten pawpaws in Kentucky—they’re still a novelty.
Outside, I walk around the food court, where trucks and carts are lined up along a parklet and sidewalks. I stop for homemade ice cream and ask if the vendor has ever made a batch with pawpaws. I’m in Kentucky, after all—maybe I’ll get lucky. “What’s in it?” the woman asks. “Pawpaws!” replies a younger woman. The two are mother and daughter. They know the fruit, but have never made ice cream with it. So instead, I purchase a single scoop of peach ice cream. It’s good, as have been all the peaches I’ve enjoyed this summer. But as the season is soon to change, I’m interested in something different, a tropical flavor that marks the end of summer in the Ohio Valley.
Despite the size of the fruit’s native range—encompassing parts of twenty-six eastern states—only in Kentucky will you find a state-fair exhibit devoted to pawpaws. But despite the lack of official events elsewhere, there must be other places they are celebrated, eaten, and known. On this particular trip, I’m on a journey to find pawpaws, and pawpaw culture, in the Lower Mississippi Valley, Louisiana, and the Ozarks. It’s a wide region, and I have just over a week to cover it.
There are exceptions in places, but in general the lower states of the pawpaw’s native range have seen less of the growing renaissance taking place in the mid-Atlantic and midwestern states. But that doesn’t mean their pawpaw cultures aren’t just as rich. I’m curious to know if the fruit is still known, if its ripening is still relished by folks who remember pickin’ up pawpaws on the banks of the Buffalo, the Red, the Tennessee. There are enthusiasts, pawpaw people, in just about every corner of the region who contribute to the fruit’s renaissance. Among these players, I have two orchards and one nursery on my schedule, as well as a paddling excursion on the Mississippi River. For a fruit that’s heavily associated with rivers, there is little reference to fruit growing, or fruit gathering, along this iconic American river. But surely it’s out there. Neal Peterson has named his best fruit selections for the Indian names for our rivers—Susquehanna, Shenandoah, Rappahannock, Wabash, and so on. As a similar tribute, I’m heading south to find my own Mississippi pawpaw.
I leave Louisville and head for Mammoth Cave National Park where I’ll camp for the night. But first, I make a stop in Hardin County. When Neal Peterson initially released his cultivars, John Brittain was one of just three nurserymen licensed to sell those grafted varieties. With a full beard and thin face, Brittain bears a certain resemblance to Abraham Lincoln, and at the age of sixty-five he is lean and tan from decades of outdoor work. Before we tour his property along the Nolin River, which empties into the Green River at the national park, we douse ourselves in organic, all-natural bug spray. Brittain says the tick population has exploded in recent years, and points to bites on his own ankles. As we apply the pleasantly scented oil, we both wonder about its effectiveness, knowing it’s less toxic than DEET. Brittain is still getting bitten, after all. Perhaps with a little more work, an infusion of Annonaceous acetogenins could render an all-natural concoction a bit more potent. In the meantime, we spray ourselves and walk on.
Brittain’s scion wood bank is a collection of grafted trees growing in a field. From these trees’ branches he takes cuttings that are then grafted onto rootstock, which is grown from seed in the bottomland just down the hill. This is where pawpaw culture is kept alive and propagated, in a small patch near Upton, Kentucky. There’s no laboratory, no cryogenic freezer, no test tubes. It’s the work of human hands, and at the mercy of Mother Nature—a force that can often be quite punishing.
In 2011, when the Mississippi River threatened to flood Baton Rouge and New Orleans, after record floods had already taken lives and caused severe damage in several states upriver, rural farmland in Louisiana’s Morganza and Atchafalaya floodways was inundated. But effects were also felt as far away as central Kentucky, and for several weeks the Nolin River kept Brittain’s nursery under water. The majority of his young trees died. Since then, the past several years have been a process of recovery and rebuilding a diminished nursery stock.
While flooding isn’t a constant threat to nurserymen, there are other natural threats to young trees. We say that pawpaw has no pests, and that for this reason it’s attractive to organic growers. But that doesn’t mean insects ignore pawpaws altogether. “There are pests,” Cliff England once said. “Don’t let anybody kid you.” Among minor pests there is, of course, the zebra swallowtail butterfly, which feeds on leaves but doesn’t do serious damage. The tulip-tree beauty (Epimecis hortaria), a moth, is less well known, but it also consumes Asimina leaves. Slugs, as well, will indiscriminately eat the leaves of young trees, especially in moist nursery conditions. And the larvae of the pawpaw sphinx (Dolba hyloeus) also feed on pawpaw leaves. Unfortunately for Brittain, pawpaw webworms (Omphalocera munroei) have taken up residence in his trees and could potentially denude all of the pawpaws in his scion bank if left unchecked. “It’s about the only bad pest,” he says. “You can see where they’ve been chewing, they get so big they’ll even eat the stems.” So Brittain carefully removes the affected leaves and squashes as many webworms as he can find. This deliberate yet low-tech task should be sufficient to ensure that his scion bank thrives. “It’s easy to control as long as you pay attention to it,” he says.
We climb into Brittain’s small pickup truck and head down the hill along a winding, canopied road to tour his seedling patch, just a few yards from the Nolin River. We emerge from the forest and come upon a grove of knee-high pawpaws. “They’re in there thick, there’s at least a thousand. They won’t all come up,” Brittain says, then just as quickly adds: “Most of them will.”
Brittain plants corn amid yet-to-germinate pawpaw seedlings. When the treelings emerge after months of developing taproots, the much-quicker-growing cornstalks offer the shade pawpaws will want at this young age. When it’s time to graft in a year or so, the cornstalks are long gone and what’s left is a lush grove of strong, young pawpaws, ready for digging and shipment. Generally, transplanting of pawpaws is not recommended—the plant’s long taproot makes the job nearly impossible. Attempting to thin a patch is even less effective. In a colony, the majority of trees are actually suckers, which have a dramatically lower success rate than field-grown seedlings (suckers do not possess the developed, fibrous root system of a seedling). But Brittain uses a backhoe and digs very deep. His pawpaws overwhelmingly survive and establish successfully in their new homes, however many states away.
Brittain says growing seedling pawpaws with corn has been a good discovery, and other growers have devised similar innovations. At his farm in southern Ohio, Ron Powell places five-gallon buckets—w
ith the bottoms cut out—over young trees. With the buckets in place, Ron’s pawpaws are protected not only from the sun’s rays but also from errant tractor mowing.
Brittain plans to retire soon and scale back his production of grafted nut trees: black walnut, butternut, hican, and so on. “It’s a hard business,” he says. “It’s hard to graft little nut trees.” Meanwhile, in addition to enjoying pawpaws as a native fruit that’s relatively pest-free, he also finds them less difficult. “Everything about them is easier,” he says. “After we’re done doing nut trees we’ll probably still be doing pawpaws.”
After leaving the nursery, I have a quick dinner and arrive at my campsite in the park. In the morning I pack up my tent and prepare to tour the largest cave system in the world. But with time to kill before the first tour, I’m afforded a chance at a little pawpaw hunting. Inside the park, patches of roadside pawpaws form dense colonies, as tightly packed as any thickets I’ve seen. I check among the trees but there’s no fruit, ripe or unripe, to be found. While I’m hunting pawpaws, other plants catch my eye. A maypop vine climbs a nearby tree, its passionflower in full bloom. The flower is wide, as delicate as loosely woven silk; a tapestry in progress. I pick one of its green fruits, hanging singly from the vine. Like pawpaw, the maypop, or Passiflora incarnata, was eaten by Native Americans, and by early settlers and pioneers in the South. Wondering if it is ripe, I open it—pop!—but I am too early; the inside is dry and underdeveloped. I’ve eaten maypop only once before. The pulp is quite similar to its tropical relative, passion fruit, though a bit more tart. It is yet another component of the eastern forest that blurs the lines between tropical and temperate, a connection to the ancient past.
I descend a trail into a shaded hollow. The bank is lined with pawpaw trees, older and taller here, but again, I find no fruit. It’s August in Kentucky, yet under this canopy it’s a good ten degrees cooler. There’s a light rain falling, but the leaves above catch most of the drops. Walking this trail, I’m reminded of great Indian roads: the Seneca Trail, the Great Minquas Path, the Catawba Trail, among others. Centuries ago, on trails like this one, Native Americans traveled great distances for trade, hunting, and war. And on those journeys they knew where the hunting of deer, buffalo, and turkey was good, and where, when, and what berries and greens were ripe for picking (including the appropriate time to open the maypops). In this month, travelers would have begun to shake the many pawpaw trees. They would have known where high-yielding or good-tasting patches were located; the experience would have been less a hopeful rambling—like my current exploration—than a visit to a familiar orchard.
When the visitors center opens, I buy a ticket for the tour. Waiting for the bus that will drive us to the cave, I speak with a couple who live nearby. The man was born and raised in Kentucky, but has lived all over the country, including Florida, where he worked on a shrimp boat and slept on beaches. The woman, a self-described military brat, spent her school years in Memphis. They’ve both heard of pawpaws, but it’s been years since the man has eaten one. And while the woman has never tried pawpaw, she is no stranger to foraging, or to the woods. In fact, she’s a ginseng hunter.
While pawpaws may hold the promise of value to orchardists and wild pickers, ginseng is already big business. According to West Virginia University, dried wild ginseng can sell for up to $350 a pound, and both wild and cultivated crops account for $70 million in exports annually.2 But it’s not the money that attracts my fellow tourgoer, nor is it strictly ginseng, as she has also dug redroot and yellow root, among other forest crops. “It’s just an excuse to get out and hunt,” she says.
Pawpaws might seem tricky to grow at first—with seed stratification, transplant challenges, and shade requirements—but compared with wild ginseng and ramps, they’re in fact quite easily domesticated. The latter two plants not only favor shade, but require it, so they must be grown in the woods or under artificial conditions that mimic nature. Because ginseng and ramps are often simply wildcrafted—taken from the wild—biologists have warned that their demand could lead to their extirpation, since both are typically harvested as whole plants. Pawpaw, which is coveted primarily for its fruit, is less likely to be harmed by such fads. There might occasionally be a rush to taste pawpaws, but rarely because consumption will cure what ails the eater’s health. But even with Nature’s Sunshine’s Paw Paw Cell-Reg, which is derived from the tree’s twig bark, the process is as harmful as pruning a tree, which is to say, not very. And in time, if a population—whether in Kentucky or in South Korea—wants a more reliable and abundant source of pawpaw (for fruit or medicine), they can just plant an orchard—whereas ginseng and ramps have been less successful under large-scale cultivation, and continue to be harvested from the wild or in carefully maintained landscapes.
Finally, I tour the Mammoth Caves. As pawpaws evolved, traveling from the tropics to temperate Kentucky over millennia, these caves were forming too. Geologists have estimated that the oldest parts began forming around ten million years ago. And while that’s certainly ancient, I recall that pawpaws are even more so.
The caves are impressive, as is their human story. Various Native American groups used them for shelter for thousands of years. Archaeologists have determined that among the arts practiced by the local prehistoric cave dwellers, textile manufacturing was the most highly developed.3 At archaeological digs of similar dwelling sites in Kentucky, the most common fiber recovered was the inner bark of pawpaw—used in both textiles and cordage, varying greatly in its degree of coarseness.4 In 1936 archaeologist Volney Jones documented remains of Asimina triloba fibers in nearby Salts Cave—within Mammoth Cave National Park—and elsewhere throughout Kentucky. Along with Indian hemp, linden, canary grass, cattail, leatherwood, and rattlesnake master, pawpaw bark was a common fiber in the prehistoric textiles uncovered, including sandals, slippers, belts, baskets, mats, blankets, cordage, and loincloths.5 Pawpaws were eaten whenever available by those same prehistoric peoples, but those artisans may have prized the tree more for its fibers than for its fruit.
Kentucky State University has a listing of pawpaw nurseries on its website, and since it’s alphabetical by state, Alabamian Dale Brooks’s is listed first. I emailed Dale ahead of my visit, and if I’d had any doubts of his commitment to the fruit, I was reassured by his email handle: pawpawman.
Dale was raised on a farm on Brindley Mountain, in north Alabama, a few miles south of the Tennessee River. Years after Dale had moved away, an old neighbor told him there were pawpaws in a holler there, but Dale didn’t know them as a kid. He lives now in Decatur and says, “They’re all over the place down here.” Nearby, at the Wheeler National Wildlife Refuge, pawpaw spread through the bottomlands of the Tennessee, with suckers increasing in size like a staircase, smaller close to the river but larger as you approach their various mother trees.
As we tour his garden—eight acres of rare fruits and ornamentals—Dale makes a confession. “I got tired of planting the same thing everybody else had,” he says, “and I started getting off in the fringes.” He laughs, as though growing pawpaws—and Pakistan mulberry and mayhaws and rare bamboos—is a kind of counter-horticulture. In many ways it is; many folks in the area either don’t know pawpaws or, in a familiar story, have lost touch with the fruit over the decades. But through the years, Dale and his wife, Reda, have done their best, to borrow a phrase, to bring pawpaws to the people.
“Have I ever told you how I got started in pawpaws?” Dale asks. “Back over on the other side of our yard there is a bunch of wild, native pawpaws. My wife got a tree book one year, and got to looking through it and identified it.” This particular thicket—a clonal patch—wasn’t producing fruit. By coincidence, though, it wasn’t long until the Brooks were able to taste some. “My eldest son, one day he brought this fruit home [from school],” Dale says. “One of his teachers had a friend up in Ohio, came down and brought a sack and gave all of them one.” Dale’s son, rather than e
ating the pawpaw in class, brought it home to share with the family. “Good thing he did,” Dale says with a laugh, knowing now the turning point that this single fruit was. “We got the cutting board out that night and sliced it up. And we all liked it. So I set out on trying to find me a source.”
Dale ordered grafted trees, ordered seed. “I started making me a collection of it,” he says, “and the trees got big enough, started having fruit on them.” He protected the fruit from local critters by wrapping the clusters in chicken wire. “It was on a Friday, and I said [to the pawpaw], ‘I’ll see you tomorrow morning, mister.’” But as anyone tending a small patch of pawpaws could have predicted, something else beat him to it, despite his elaborate efforts. “Went out there, looked the next morning, and it wasn’t there,” Dale says. “It was about twelve foot over there, and about half of it was left.” Wondering what I might do in that situation, I ask—since it was the first pawpaw he’d grown himself—if, despite the critter that had chewed on it and discarded it so callously, he ate it anyway. “Oh, yeah, oh sure,” he says. “That don’t slow you up.”
Dale was soon growing so many pawpaws he didn’t know what to do with them. He went to the Decatur Farmers Market and gave pawpaws to customers and vendors. Still, there was just so much. So, in 2003, the Brookses organized their first Pawpaw Day. Despite the fact that Dale does not enjoy public speaking, he invited hundreds of strangers to his home. Alabama Living magazine even advertised the event. The Brookses offered samples and had fresh fruit and trees for sale. More than a hundred people showed up. Four years later, they held another event, and two hundred people came. That year, Reda made ice cream. “My wife saw one woman go through the line three times,” Dale says.
Dale’s pawpaws are planted in a low site that is prone to flooding. After a heavy rain, water will stand for five or six hours before receding. A few years ago, his trees began to show signs of stress. Soon more than three hundred succumbed to oak root fungus, transforming a formerly lush grove into permanent winter. Pawpaws were thought to be resistant to the fungus, which rots the tree’s root system, but it’s hard to argue with dead trees. We’re standing under one such skeleton, a lifeless twenty-five-foot ghost of a tree. “That was my best tree last year,” Dale says, “and it’s just dead. Graveyard dead.”