Here are a few more selections that you might find interesting from American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species: Strangers on the Land, by Peter Coates, published in 2006.
Before Columbus brought seeds and cuttings along on his second voyage to the West Indies, North America was home to less than 1 percent of the world’s total complement of cereals, starches, fruits, and vegetables.
Today, the only crops of significant commercial value native to the territory that became the United States are cranberry, blueberry, pecan nut, sugar maple, sunflower, and tobacco–a fact that offers eloquent testimony to the great service that has been duly rendered by a sting of public-spirited Americans…
No American public servant since [Thomas] Jefferson deserves more credit for transforming the foreign into the common than David G. Fairchild. In his capacity as agricultural explorer in charge at the Section for Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction from 1898 until 1928, Fairchild brought the navel orange to Florida and California from Brazil and oversaw the introduction of Italy’s seedless grape and China’s dry land pistachio. His most notable contributions, however, were in the introduction of the Chinese soybean and…the tree that became an essential prop of Washington, D.C.‘s monumental landscape, adorning the Tidal Basin: the Japanese flowering cherry tree.
Fairchild’s encounters with the infamous vine that “ate the South”…left him somewhat chastened. He first came across kudzu about 1900 while touring Japan, where this wild, semiwoody perennial was fed to livestock. In his autobiography he recalled a visit to a “kudzu enthusiast” in Chipley, Florida, who was renowned for singing its praises as a forage crop in the early 1900s, despite his neighbors’ distrust. “Whenever I think of that night’s talk with the kudzu pioneer,” recalled Fairchild, “I have a special feeling of pride in what might be called our American willingness to try something new, whether it be a new forage crop, a new food, or any one of a thousand new, machine-made gadgets.” Fairchild, who confessed that “perhaps I have an undue passion for the new,” retained his faith in kudzu for quite some time, despite its proclivity to spread at will. By the late 1930s, however he was expressing his growing reservations in print. The seeds he brought back from Japan and planted on his property in Florida “‘took’ with a vengeance, smothering everything they got onto, and pretty soon we became alarmed. Feeling that the kudzu was too much for us, we began to cut it out.”
Fairchild finally returned home, so to speak, in 1946, when invited to make his selection for the “My Favorite Tree” guest column in the journal of the American Forestry Association (the nation’s oldest conservation organization, founded in 1875). After mentioning a string of exotic also-rans, but discarding them as unsatisfactory, he recalled that he had seen his first grove of California coastal redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) fairly late in life, at a time when he was still besotted with exotic Asiatic promise: “A feeling of utter paralysis overtook me and the passion for planting trees, my puny little trees, anywhere, became distasteful.”
The stories in the book are great, and the social commentary is compelling. Unfortunately, every now and then a botanical clinker drops into the book’s pages, such as the one that follows the quote on redwoods immediately above, where the author waxes, “Though the redwood is only really found in California (there is a tiny patch in the most southwesterly corner of Oregon), it is arguably more American than any other tree in the United States insofar as it has no relatives, near or distant, in any other country.” Like, um, what about the Chinese dawn redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides)?
Okay, this isn’t a book you read for the botany, but it’s a worthy and thoughtful work on plants and the human condition, perfect for late winter reading as you contemplate the impending blooming of your cherry trees.
Although it’s primarily about biological immigrants to North America, Peter Coates points occasionally out that the immigrant-carrying boats sailed both directions:
The native oaks of Britain and the United States were greatly admired by J.C. Loudon, a leading British horticulturist of the mid-nineteenth century. He pronounced them “the most beautiful of trees.” Yet exotic trees had already become a mandatory ingredient of the “polite” British landscape enclosed within private estates. Loudon himself was one of the trendsetters who insisted that, notwithstanding the oak’s charms, “no residence in the modern style can have a claim to be considered as laid out in good taste, in which all the trees and shrubs employed are not either foreign ones, or improved varieties of indigenous ones.
The most sought-after of these arboreal exotics were hardy North Americans. Britons were ruthlessly condescending toward American artistic achievements at this time. “In the four quarters of the globe,” Sydney Smith famously inquired [in 1820], “who reads an American book?” or goes to an American play” or looks at an American picture or statue?” Yet no one asked “who plants an American tree?”
February 10 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape • landscape design • quotes | Tags: Add new tag • agriculture • books • David G. Fairchild • exotics • invasive plants • kudzu • native plants • Peter Coates • trees | 3 Comments »
I’ve been thinking a lot about weeds lately. Now that the weather is changing, the little cool season green interlopers are starting to show themselves with a vengeance. And as I mentioned earlier, I’m reading American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species : Strangers on the Land by Peter Coates.
The epigram that starts off chapter 3 is an amazing quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince:
There were on the planet where the little prince lived–as on all planets–good and bad plants…If it is only a sprout of radish or the sprig of a rose-bush, one would let it grow wherever it might wish. But when it is a bad plant, one must destroy it as soon as possible, the very first instant that one recognizes it. Now there were terrible seeds on the planet that was the home of the little prince; and these were the seeds of the baobab. The soil of that planet was infested with them. A baobab is something you will never, never be able to get rid of if you attend to it too late. It spreads over the entire planet. It bores clear through it with its roots. And if the planet is too small, and the baobabas are too many, they split it in pieces.
I’m not sure if Saint-Exupéry ever met a real live baobab plant, the world’s largest succulent, shown to the left in a photo by Quinn Norton (used under the Creative Commons 1.0 Attribution General License) [ source ].
And I’m not sure if the author was just using the word “baobab” just because it sounds cool and deliciously evil. But his description of a plant from hell sure describes a lot of the weeds that I feel compelled to keep up with.
After all, I wouldn’t want the world to split into pieces just because I was too lazy to weed my garden!
November 15 2008 | Categories: gardening • quotes • rambles | Tags: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry • baobabs • Peter Coates • The Little Prince • weeds | 2 Comments »
As my recent cold began to fade I began to put away the garden picture books and reach for a book that I knew would require a little more focus and reflection. I’m not that far into it yet, but Peter Coates’s American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species: Strangers on the Land is proving to be a surprisingly lively read for a book that seems aimed at an academic audience.
With interesting histories of “invading” plants and animals set against historical debates over human immigration, it’s a volume that could be interesting for many thoughtful gardeners and birders. Here are just a couple passages that touch on some of the issues in the book:
“Without question the most deplorable event in the history of American ornithology,” declared William Dawson in 1903, “was the introduction of the English Sparrow.” This may sound absurd to those acquainted with the passenger pigeon’s fate. Yet Dawson insisted that the notorious extinctions of the pigeon and the great auk … were mere “trifles” compared to the frightful repercussions for various small native birds of the “invasion of that wretched foreigner.” A dramatic remark of this sort from a century ago serves as a welcome corrective to the unreflective tone of current literature on bioinvasion, which frequently intimates that today’s level of concern in unmatched.
Those who speak of ecological nativism … give the impression that antipathy toward exotic species and the simultaneous championing of native biota have been particularly robust in the United States. This view usually emerges by default: commentators simply neglect to reflect on other national experiences. [Mark] Sagoff, [in “What’s Wrong with Exotic Species?”] though, directly compares American intolerance with a more relaxed European “cosmopolitanism” that “tolerates porous borders” for immigrant flora and fauna. He sees this as a reflection of different New and Old World conceptions of nature. Whereas Americans are dedicated to the “idea of pristine nature,” as enshrined in the related concepts of wilderness and indigenous species (native plants and animals, by implication, being biotic citizens of a terrestrial Eden), these notions, he claims, lack cultural, spiritual, and historical meaning for Europeans, who prefer their nature to be a blend of the nonhuman and the cultural. The alien organisms Europeans worry about and are keen to exclude from their countryside and farms, he explains, are genetically modified crops (mostly born in the United States).
November 09 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape • quotes • rambles | Tags: invasive species • Mark Sagoff • native animals • native plants • Peter Coates • William Dawson | 3 Comments »
The last of the tomatoes were starting to looked snacked on. And then there was this blatantly half-eaten apple leaning over the fence from the neighbor’s.
The fruits and veggies in my yard can go weeks with no competition from the local fauna. And then all of a sudden things start to go missing: that apricot that I’ve been eying for weeks, or the tomato that’s just starting to show color.
If there are lots of spoils to go around it’s not a big deal. But if we’re talking about that last tomato of the season, or the fall’s first leaves of kale, then I get very concerned.
The current critter problem: possums (or “opossums,” take your pick on what you want to call them). These little beasts keep vampire hours, appearing after sunset, and disappearing before the full moon sets. They have no problem getting high into trees or climbing over tall fences.
One recent night I was in the yard as the neighbors were talking. Then they got all quiet, like they were interrupted by something astonishing.
“Oh good. It’s going over to their yard,” someone said. And by “their,” they were of course meaning “my.” And I’m sure they had just experienced a possum sighting.
I have yet to see one this year, though I’ve seen the damage. [Cue the space-alien music…] They’re out there. Somewhere. Watching. Waiting. Ready to invade.
Maybe that’s why I just put on my stack of books to read Peter Coates’s American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species : Strangers on the Land, a book from 2006. I’ve only skimmed it so far, but there are discussions of invading animals like English sparrows and European starlings, and introduced plants like eucalyptus and Japanese cherry trees. And these outsiders are related to American notions surrounding immigration, xenophobic tendencies, and the American concern over attacks from outer space.
Perusing the index I’ve just noticed that there’s no mention of my immediate problem, the Virginia possum, an animal that was introduced to the West during the 1930s, perhaps as a potential food source during the Depression. Too bad.
I’m convinced that this little marsupial that’s laughed at in an unending supply of jokes about slow-moving roadkill-victims is actually a creature of some secret higher intelligence with immense powers. It clearly has it figured out how to control my mind. How else can you explain my working long hours, planting and tending my garden, just to keep the local possum population supplied with a delicious bounty of fresh produce?
Be very afraid.
October 04 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden • rambles | Tags: garden pests • invasive species • opossums • Peter Coates • possums | 1 Comment »
