The Perfect Fruit Read online

  Burbank’s refusal to acknowledge the importance of Mendel (not to mention his embrace of eugenics) eventually hurt his reputation among scientists and other plant breeders. But to the public at large, he became as important a figure as his acquaintances Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. Like Edison and Ford, Burbank was famous not only for what he did but for what he came to represent. Just as the name “Ford” spoke to the possibilities of the automobile and “Edison” was shorthand for the innovations of the modern age, “Burbank” was the stand-in for all of man’s work in the plant kingdom. More than any one new plant variety Burbank brought into the world, his lasting legacy, one later disciple said, was that “he awakened a universal interest in plant breeding.”

  Still, as famous as he was, Burbank struggled his entire life to make his breeding operation profitable. Burbank released more than one hundred plums over the course of his life, and just as he did with his eponymous potato and almost every other new variety he developed, Burbank sold the rights to his plums after introducing them. Though he kept the right to continue using a variety in his breeding program, he usually received a onetime fee for the variety itself and had to surrender any future claim on the profits made from its propagation and sale. That, of course, is where the true value of a variety lies, and that Burbank couldn’t benefit from the public acceptance of his fruit was a pain he felt more and more as his varieties became known across the world. Toward the end of his life, he acknowledged what Floyd Zaiger would come to realize after being bitten by the dreaded disease of fruit breeding. “Plant improvement of any kind tests purse and patience,” Burbank wrote. “But the improvement of tree fruits strains both to the breaking point. Working with vegetables or flowers, it is possible to get valuable improvements well under way in from three to five years—after which, continued selection makes progress more rapid. With tree fruits you have only just begun after a dozen years of crossing, growing, testing, and selecting.” Then, he added this weary postscript: “Viewing the work in retrospect I assuredly have no cause to regret that it was undertaken, yet it has been a most laborious task.”

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  The chronicles of fruit breeding were already littered with cases who might have had cause to regret the path they had chosen. Take Jacob Moore. His entry in the 1914 edition of Liberty Hyde Bailey’s Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture tells a woeful but not uncommon tale: “Moore, Jacob, pomologist, was born at Brighton, New York in 1836. His life work was the development of new fruits, which he produced in large numbers by scientific plant breeding. He was the originator of the Diploma currant, Red Cross currant, Hooker strawberry, Brighton Diana Hamburg and Moore’s Diamond grapes, Barr Seckel pear and thousands of other fruits, which have enriched the fruit growers of America many thousands of dollars, but which brought him hardly a sufficient pittance to keep body and soul together.”

  Or consider the case of Ephraim Bull (whom Paul Collins profiles winningly in his book about losers, Banvard’s Folly). After struggling for years to breed a grape that could rival the classic European grapes but still withstand the climate and pests of New En gland, Bull finally pulled from his vines some grapes that seemed worthy. This was in 1849, the year Burbank was born, and it was in the very same town of Concord, twenty miles east of the Burbanks, where Thoreau and Emerson held forth. (Bull’s neighbor was Bronson Alcott, Louisa May’s father. It was Alcott who introduced him to the idea of selective breeding.) Bull named the grape after the town, and the reception for the Concord grape was overwhelming. He partnered with a company to sell the vines and made more than three thousand dollars in the first year they were on sale. But since he had no claim on the grape—there was no patent protection for fruit breeders—anyone who got his hands on it could not only grow as much as he wanted, but could also sell the vines to other interested growers. Sales tapered even as the Concord became the country’s most popular grape. Bull grew disgusted with the fruit business and got out. Meanwhile, a man named Thomas Welch hit upon the idea of bottling juice from the Concord. By the time he made his fortune with what would evolve into Welch’s grape juice, Bull was broke and living in an old folks’ home. When he died, the epitaph on his grave read: HE SOWED, OTHERS REAPED.

  Early in his career, when the subject of patenting plants came up, Burbank seemed to oppose the idea on the grounds that plants were “a law unto themselves.” But after decades of endless crossing and recrossing had resulted in fame but no fortune, Burbank concluded that without any legal protection for the plant breeder, he “would hesitate to advise a young man, no matter how gifted or devoted, to adopt plant breeding as a life work.” And so, before he died in 1926, he did endorse the idea of a law that would grant the breeder some protection. Several years later, when the United States Congress was considering just such a bill, Burbank’s endorsement proved crucial. The bill had stalled in the House of Representatives, mostly due to the resistance of Congressman Fiorello La Guardia, of New York. In the course of debate, when he was asked by a congressman from Indiana what he thought of Burbank, La Guardia said, “I think he is one of the greatest Americans that ever lived.” The congressman from Indiana responded by reading a letter that Burbank had written to Paul Stark, who was then the head of Stark Brothers Nursery. The letter read in part:

  I have been for years in correspondence with leading breeders, nurserymen, and Federal officials and I despair of anything being done at present to secure to the plant breeder any adequate returns for his enormous outlays of energy and money . . . A man can patent a mouse trap or copyright a nasty song, but if he gives to the world a new fruit that will add millions to the value of earth’s annual harvests he will be fortunate if he is rewarded by so much as having his name connected with the result.

  La Guardia immediately reversed his position, and the Plant Patent Act of 1930 soon became law. It gave breeders seventeen years of protection against competition on varieties they hybridized or selected after open pollination. (Later, it would be extended to twenty years.) More to the point, the Act allowed breeders to profit from their work. Thomas Edison, who was awarded more than one thousand patents during his life, had also helped to push the measure through Congress. He insisted that by providing some financial incentives to breeders, the Plant Patent Act would “give us many Burbanks.”

  One of those many Burbanks was Fred Anderson. As a young man, Anderson apprenticed for Luther Burbank in Santa Rosa. Eventually, he moved to the San Joaquin Valley and settled in Le Grand, where he would do the work that would earn him the designation as the Father of the Modern Nectarine and where he would hire a young man named Floyd Zaiger to come work alongside him.

  5

  ONCE HE AND Betty decided to moonlight as fruit breeders, Floyd had to start building up a wide enough gene pool for his operation. A wider gene pool means more gene tic diversity, more individual traits at your disposal as a breeder. Having a wide gene pool doesn’t make you a great breeder, just as shopping at a huge supermarket doesn’t make you a great cook. On the other hand, if you have access to only a limited number of ingredients, there’s only so much you can do in the kitchen.

  Floyd needed fruit trees and lots of them, so he called on his friend John Wynne, who was now running the Dave Wilson Nursery. Every year, the nursery had a big burn pile of seedlings and stock that they hadn’t sold or used, and John offered Floyd a couple hundred of these trees. He wouldn’t let Floyd pay him, but he said, “If you ever get something good, I want to be the first in line to introduce it.” They shook on it and that was that.

  There were several main challenges for Floyd and other breeders at this time. Most of the widely grown commercial peaches, plums, and nectarines were older varieties that ate well but were not ideally suited for the industrial food system that had sprung up after the Second World War. This was, after all, the golden age of food processing and the beginning of the rise of chain stores; consistency, durability, appearance, and a long shelf life were the emerging values for food. Also, most of the f
resh stone fruit varieties were compressed into a short, summer growing season that started June 1 and ended at the very start of August. If fruit breeders could develop varieties that matured earlier or later, they could extend the season and help growers make more money.

  Since most of the Zaigers’ property was filled with azaleas, Floyd went around to nearby growers and offered to “rent” fruit trees from them for twenty dollars apiece. He hired three young women who had just moved from Mexico and he put them in charge of pollenizing the trees he’d rented. (Forty years later, one of the women, Flora, is still in charge of pollenizing, though her crew has grown to handle a considerably greater volume of trees.) Using those trees as the female parents, they pollenized them in February and then picked the fruit over the course of the summer. As they picked the fruit, they stripped off the flesh from the pit so that they could germinate the hybrid seed.

  Still, they needed more space for all those seedlings, and so Floyd leased five acres from a neighbor. At night, when all the azalea business had been tended to and the kids had gone to sleep, he and Betty planted those seedlings by the light of the moon. The first year they had the five extra acres, they planted about eight hundred seedlings. But the next year, Floyd rented some other types of trees from different neighbors, and Flora and the girls hauled the ladders around and pollenized those trees. In the summer, they picked the fruit and stripped off the flesh, then planted those seedlings. The second year, there were more than eight hundred to plant.

  In May of 1961, Floyd caught his first break when he discovered a bud sport—a gene tic mutation—in his orchard. Instead of the regular Springtime peaches he was expecting, one tree had fruit that was a little different. It ripened a few days before the rest, and the fruit was generally larger than the Spring-times. The skin had a higher blush and the yellow flesh was relatively firm. All these differences made it a potentially more attractive peach. So after successfully grafting over the mutant and evaluating it for a few years, Zaiger named the new variety Royal Gold. He was awarded a patent on it in 1966, five years after he first discovered it.

  A couple of years later, Floyd took a trip over to Europe to see how his yellow-fleshed peach was doing over there. During a tour of the stone fruit–growing areas of France, Floyd noticed that white-fleshed peaches and nectarines were often selling for twice what the yellow-fleshed fruit fetched. The whites had a few things going for them that the traditional varieties back home lacked. In general, they tended to have less acid, so their flavor was milder. Also, the whites tended to give off more of that peachy aroma. “I tell everybody that the French want to inhale half of their peach and eat the other half,” Floyd said.

  The big question mark with white-fleshed peaches and nectarines was their shipping quality. When ripe, they were very soft. In Europe, this wasn’t such a big deal; growers there could fully ripen their fruit before they shipped it, because they weren’t shipping very far. Shipping from France to Belgium was like us going from Modesto to Los Angeles. But if you tried to put ripe fruit from California on a truck to Boston, you’d have four or five days of bumping down the road, and the fruit would be mush by the time it got to the stores. Mostly for that reason, no California growers were interested in white-fleshed fruit and few American breeders had done any work on them. Remembering Fred Anderson’s fig obsession, Floyd said, “Since no one had done much with them, I realized that everything I did would look good.”

  Back home, Floyd started working on building some firmness into white-fleshed peaches and nectarines. It was becoming more and more common in California to pick “green” fruit that was harder and could better withstand long-distance shipping, and the lower acid of the whites also meant that they tasted sweeter when they were picked before they were ripe. He was still concerned that the whites wouldn’t be accepted in America, but they were popular in Asia, and many Californian growers had started shipping fruit to the Pacific Rim. The white-fleshed peaches and nectarines did go over well there, so well in fact that everybody wanted in on the action. Eventually, there were more than enough whites being grown in California to satisfy Asian demand. So the growers started shipping whites within the United States, and they found that, with a little marketing, American consumers were open to white-fleshed fruit, too. Today, roughly 30 percent of the peaches and nectarines sold in the United States have white flesh. Whether you love a low-acid, white-fleshed peach that crunches like an apple or rue the day that peaches stopped dripping down your chin as you ate them, you have the Zaigers to thank for it.

  By the mid-1970s, Floyd had increased the volume of his gene pool enough to start focusing on pedigree. (Of all the descriptions I’ve heard about the art-science of fruit breeding, David Ramming’s is the best. Ramming is the USDA’s main plum and grape breeder in California. You have to have volume, Ramming said when I met him once. That was a necessary but insufficient condition. “But breeding is based on gene tics, and gene tics is a field of chance. I liken it to gambling. If you go to Las Vegas and play blackjack, and you don’t know the game, what are your chances of winning? Not very good. If you know the cards—which cards are high, what the cards mean, what the chances are that certain cards will appear and in which combinations—and if you can remember what’s been played, you increase your chances of winning, even though it’s still a game of chance.”)

  In fruit breeding, if you know the inheritance scheme of the traits you want to improve (say you want to add size to an existing variety of plum) then you can plan the breeding methods (by crossing it with plums that have already been successful in passing along size). And if you can get better at identifying the traits you’re looking for, and if you can pick them out earlier, then you’re increasing your chances of winning. Anything you can do to improve your chances is important, and luck doesn’t hurt either. (Gary Player is instructive here: The more you cross, the luckier you get.)

  Hybrid trees that have more than one species in their genetic makeup are called “interspecific” trees. The Zaigers moved into interspecifics when they got into the development of rootstock, the hardy, disease-resistant base tree onto which commercial growers graft new varieties. A rootstock is not developed for its fruit; instead, it’s like the engine on top of which a variety is built. The right rootstock can withstand less-than-ideal soil types and protect a tree from pests and diseases. Good rootstock can also help to make the fruit grow faster, bigger, and sweeter, and can produce a greater volume of fruit. In a patented cultivar the Zaigers called Citation, they had their first rootstock star. Citation is a peach-plum hybrid that is now a standard rootstock for growers of plums and apricots in California. Though the patent on Citation expired years ago, Floyd still keeps a couple of trees as ornamentals along a long wall of a storage barn next to the greenhouse where they do all of their crossing. On the last day of the spring visit I made to Zaiger Genetics, we stopped to look at Citation. The flowers were open and Floyd pulled one off. He held it up for me to see.

  “These are like mules,” he said, pointing into the flower. “There are anthers there but you see there’s no pistil in it, so it can’t set fruit. Why, for these rootstocks, we didn’t care, because we propagated them from cuttings.” Floyd dropped the flower, stepped back from the tree, looked at it with a smile on his face, and in the wistful tone a man might take when standing over the burial marker of a cherished hunting dog, said, “She was real good to us.”

  As we stood there next to Citation, Floyd explained the genealogy of another Zaiger rootstock called Viking, which is one-half peach, one-quarter almond, one-eighth plum, and one-eighth apricot. One year, Zaiger said, someone noticed two small fruits growing on a tree of Prunus blireiana, a plum tree with double pink flowers that’s used as an ornamental. The fruits were fuzzy like an apricot, and the Zaigers figured they were straight plumcots, a cross made by the bees. They germinated the seeds and babied the seedlings, which were so genetically unstable that they almost refused to grow. Eventually, the Zaigers coaxed out som
e flowers. From the flowers, they took pollen and used it on an almond tree. Those crosses resulted in a couple of fruits, and the Zaigers germinated the pits to get seedlings.

  “One of them grew that high”—he spread his index finger and thumb apart—“and then died. The other grew like a weed.” Grafting in a new variety of fruit is a big investment of time and money for a grower. The old variety gets chainsawed, leaving only the trunk of the rootstock onto which the new variety is then grafted. But if a new variety has more potential, then it’s worth the investment of time and money. To put in new rootstock, though, is much more daunting: The old trees must be uprooted and burned, the soil fumigated, the new trees planted. It’s a once-every-twenty-years undertaking. You don’t just wake up one morning and decide to treat yourself to new rootstock.

  Because of this, breeders tend to aim more precisely when developing rootstock. What quality is lacking in what you have? Which specific problem needs to be addressed? As the Zaigers continued to work on the rootstock that eventually would become Viking, they had two problems in mind. One was that almond trees tended to blow over in high winds. Another was that peaches tended to do poorly in high-alkaline soil. If you plant a plum in high-alkaline soil, its root hairs secrete acid and neutralize the soil, so that it can pick up iron and zinc and the other nutrients that turn the tree green. If you have a peach tree in that same soil, the tree’s all yellow. It can’t pick up that iron and zinc, because it doesn’t secrete the acid to neutralize the soil.