The Perfect Fruit Read online

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  MY LIFE HAD begun to feel like that old Tootsie Roll commercial: What ever it was I thought I saw became a pluot to me. I saw them everywhere I looked, and even if something didn’t have anything to do with pluots, I still found a way to relate it to them. This, I think, is a common symptom of love. Almost every book I read during this period has pluot-related notes scribbled on the insides of its cover, and I kept a running file on my computer where I recorded my pluot version of Deep Thoughts:

  “Plums in Iraq?”

  “Pluots: Are they an absorption or a diversification?”

  There were even some signs that I was dreaming about pluots: One winter morning, I woke up and found that in the night I had scribbled the following message on a pad I kept by the bed: e pluribus unum prunus. Out of many, one plum.

  When I came across a poem by Louise Glück called “The Traveler,” I printed the first part and hung it above my desk. It seemed like a sign:

  At the top of the tree was what I wanted.

  Fortunately, I had read books:

  I knew I was being tested.

  I knew nothing would work—

  not to climb that high, not to force

  the fruit down. One of three results must follow:

  the fruit isn’t what you imagined,

  or it is but fails to satiate.

  Or it is damaged in falling

  and as a shattered thing torments you forever.

  Still, I began to find that loads of people had heard about pluots, and they didn’t always see the fruit in the same way I did. Articles about the Zaigers popped up in newspapers and magazines, and in many of them, the Zaigers were made out to be mad scientists of the white-lab-coat-and-crazy-hair variety. For example, in a Wired magazine breakdown of modern fruits in which two Zaiger hybrids were mentioned, the introduction read: “We love Twinkies, Slim Jims, and any kind of processed cheese-like spread. Let’s face it, those food scientists toiling in the basements of transnational conglomerates know what’s tasty. Not to be outdone, produce growers are taking a shot at engineering superfoods . . .” And on ABC’s World News with Charles Gibson, the reporter intoned: “If you’ve paid attention to what you buy at the grocery store, you may have noticed that fruit has changed. Where once there were dependable McIntosh apples, red plums, and yellow peaches, now the fruit displays are arranged with such exotics as the Gala apple, Pinto peach, Pluot, and Nectaplum . . . A peach is no longer just a peach. Much of the fruit today . . . is designed or outright invented.” Naturally, this iffiness about what pluots were and how they were developed spilled over and was magnified on the Internet, where I regularly read blog posts condemning the pluot as just another genetically modified Frankenfood that corporations were trying to push down the throats of an unsuspecting public.

  This wasn’t what I imagined the fruit to be, and fortunately I had read books—about fruit and breeding—and so understood that pluots weren’t genetically engineered in the lab. Like the “dependable” old McIntosh and yellow peach, pluots were the result of selective breeding of the sort that had been around practically since the dawn of agriculture. They weren’t altered using any systemmore sophisticated than the ones that bees had used for as long as bees had been around. In this sense, they were genetically engineered in the way that pretty much every fruit in the produce section—and the farmer’s market—was genetically engineered.

  The closely related stone fruits—almonds, apricots, cherries, nectarines, peaches, and plums—belong to a genus called Prunus. Recent research points to one common ancestor for all the stone fruits—a bitter almond—but today, botanists recognize hundreds of different Prunus species.

  While the world’s roster of plums is vast and varied, just about every commercially grown fresh plum in California is a descendant of Prunus salicina. The varieties of that species are known as “Japanese plums” because Japan is where their recent ancestors were imported from starting in the late nineteenth century. In fact, older records of these plums have been found farther west, in China, where Prunus salicina has been eaten fresh for thousands of years and has been known by thousands of names. (The Taoist sage Laozi observed that “the names that can be named are not unvarying names,” and while he wasn’t—as far as I know—referring specifically to plums, he did have the good fortune to be born under a flowering plum blossom tree, whose five-petaled clusters are sacred in China.) Many of the varieties that thrived in the wild in China were cultivated and improved for centuries by the Japanese, who were no strangers to plums; pits found there date back more than two thousand years. Plums were sold in the markets of Edo seven centuries ago, and later, during the feudal wars in Japan, the roving samurai would subsist in part on umeboshi, sour plums that had been pickled and dried and could last for years.

  In central and eastern Eu rope, archaeologists digging around in prehistoric ruins have found pits from plums that resemble Prunus domestica. Today, that species is the most common of the so-called European plums, a general name which, as with the Japanese plums, has more to do with where they were popularized than where they came from in the first place. Were these plums taken to Eu rope from the Caucasus, from ancient Assyria? Maybe. Alexander the Great probably carried some of these varieties back from western Asia after his conquest of much of it in the fourth century B.C. Some historians do point to Alexander’s Greece, but many more point to classical Rome as the place where European plums were first domesticated on a large scale. In volume twenty-three of his thirty-seven-volume Historia Naturalis, Pliny the Elder mentioned Rome’s “great crowd of plums”—this was in the first century A.D.—and then he went on in some detail to describe the medicinal effects that juice steeped with dried plums could have on the bowels. Taking the point of view that many have adopted before and since then, Pliny thought that Prunus armeniaca, the apricot, was just another type of plum.

  Over the years, as plums were carried along trade and war routes, they were resettled and renamed. In the Middle Ages, more varieties of Prunus domestica, as well as varieties of Prunus insititia—the damson plum—found their way back to Europe in the packs of the returning Crusaders. Most damsons are sour to the point of inedibility, but their high acid content made them ideal for jams and preserves. Plums may have arrived in England much earlier, as domestica pits have been found in Iron Age digs, and stones resembling damson pits have been found in excavations of Roman camps there. Then again, those pits could be from bullaces, blue and tart like damsons, which grew wild in England and had been cultivated at least by the fourteenth century, in time for Chaucer to write about them in the gardens of monasteries there.

  By the sixteenth century, En gland was full of plums. In mid-July 1545, one of Henry VIII’s warship’s, the Mary Rose, set sail to do battle with the French. While preparing to engage, the ship unexpectedly heeled over and was lost. Though survivors’ accounts differ—only a handful made it out, while five hundred or more souls sank with the ship—one popular scenario has it that the Mary Rose’s gun portals had been left open after a round of fire, and water rose above them and overtook the ship. However she was lost, the ship was a favorite of Henry VIII, and the crew had been fed accordingly. Having rediscovered the Mary Rose in 1966, excavators later found barrels of cattle carcasses, pig bones, venison, mutton, and preserved North Sea cod; pep-permills; and a large basket of plum pits, five varieties in all. Researchers believe that the fruit had been fresh, picked just before the Mary Rose had gone to sea.

  Across the channel, France was cultivating its own share of plums. The Agen plums of the southwest—which centuries later would be the foundation for the California prune market—had enough sugar that they were still sweet when dried. The Mirabelles, yellow and honeyed, were eaten fresh and were used to make brandy. Another one, a yellowish green plum called the Reine Claude, probably originated in present-day Armenia. Like a lot of fruit, it trickled over the years westward into Italy and then drifted up to France. There, it was named for Claude, the
wife of François I (who watched with his navy as the Mary Rose sank). The fruit is syrupy-sweet, round, and small enough for most people to fit whole into their mouths. Later, a Paris-based English minister named John Gage sent the plum to his brother, Sir Thomas Gage, in Suffolk. The tag identifying the fruit was lost along the way and so Sir Thomas’s gardener, stuck for a name, just called the plum the “Greengage.” (Other sources suggest that the plum was the namesake of a Sir William Gage who brought the plum from France himself. Still others claim that the fruit had been circulating around England under the name Verdoch since the early 1600s and that some Gage or another was merely the first person to distribute it widely.)

  By the late seventeenth century, botanists were beginning to uncover the mechanics of plant life. In the 1670s, Ne-hemiah Grew gave a presentation to the Royal Society, in London, putting forth the idea that plants had a sex life. Several years later, he published The Anatomy of Plants, in which he wrote that a plant’s stamens were its male parts and that the pollen in them carried reproductive cells and was therefore the plant’s sperm. A decade and a half later, at the end of the seventeenth century, the German botanist Camerarius discovered that the stamen and pistil were both necessary for a plant to reproduce, though it wouldn’t be until later that scientists figured out exactly what did what inside the flower.

  By then, Europeans had been exploring the New World for two hundred years. Having come across the Mississippi River in 1541, the Spaniard Hernando de Soto found along its banks several types of wild plum. These were varieties of Prunus americana, the most widespread of the twelve plum species native to North America, which grew in a patchwork from New England to the Gulf of Mexico, all the way west across the frontier. The first colonists brought their own seeds and plants from Europe, but soon after landing, the Pilgrims encountered beach plums, Prunus maritima, the small, wild fruit that grows along the eastern seaboard of the United States. In 1621, after the Pilgrims’ brutal first winter in Plymouth, Edward Winslow wrote of the discoveries: “Plums of three sorts, white, black, and red, being almost as good as a Damson.” Ten years later, plums were growing alongside “smalnuts, hurtleberries, and hawes of whitethorne” at the “Governor’s Garden” of John Winthrop, the first leader of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

  As more Eu rope ans settled in America, native and imported plums spread out from Massachusetts across the colonies. The Dutch planted them in New Amsterdam, and later, in Virginia, George Washington had plums growing at Mount Vernon, some of which he had grafted from the then-famous orchards of Colonel George Mason. Like Washington, Thomas Jefferson favored greengages. In North Carolina, John Lawson, the surveyor general of that territory, described the first efforts on the part of European settlers to domesticate a native species. He called it the “American Damson” because it resembled the plum he knew so well from the Old World: “We have the common, red and black, which bear well. I never saw any grafted in this country, the common excepted, which was grafted on an indian plum stock, and bore well . . . Their Fruit is red, and very palatable to the sick. They are of a quick Growth, and will bear from the Stone in five years, on their Stock.” This “American Damson” turned out to be a variety of beach plum, which is one of the most stubborn plums to domesticate. Considering this, Lawson got spectacular results with the plums. Typically, his success with fruit didn’t translate to larger temporal rewards; years later he was taken captive by locals and tortured to death with splinters of burning pine.

  In 1737, the great Swedish taxonomist Linnaeus published Hortus Cliffortianus, a breakdown of the famous gardens of the Dutch banker George Clifford. In it, he first used the word Prunus to describe the genus of stone fruits. Linnaeus split Prunus into four subgenera: prunus (plums and apricots), amygdala (almonds and peaches), cerasus (cherries), and padus (bird cherries). Later, he grouped them all into just prunus and amygdala, but the Swiss botanist Augustin Pyramus de Candolle redivided them into five subgenera. Since then, the various cherries have been split into several subgenera, and peaches have earned their own subgenus persica, so named because they were believed at one time to have originated in ancient Persia. (Now it’s thought that peaches made it to Persia on trade routes from China.) Many contemporary pomologists, convinced that all the stone fruits have one common ancestor, no longer bother with any of the subgenera and instead break Prunus out just according to species.

  The same year Linnaeus published his Hortus, the Prince Nursery of Long Island was founded by Robert Prince in New York. It was the first commercial nursery of any note in the colonies. In 1771, the Princes became the first nurserymen to publish a catalogue of their varieties. It listed thirty-three plums, among them the greengage, the Yellow Egg (“as big as an hen’s egg”), the White bonum magnum, the Drab d’Or, the Carline, the Early Sweet Damson, and the Fotheringham. (Fifty years later, the nursery would claim to have nearly one hundred fifty plum varieties.) The note at the bottom of the one-sheet catalogue left explicit directions for the interested fruit grower:

  Any person having a mind for any of the above trees, and choose to have them sent to New-York, they can have them sent on Tuesday and Friday of every week, as there is a boat that constantly goes from Flushing to New-York on them days, and may commonly be found at Burling’s Slip ( John Yates, master). If any person should want to send their orders for trees, and the boat should not be there, they are desired to leave them with Mr. William Field, merchant, at the head of Burling’s Slip, in New-York.

  Various Princes authored important plant-related treatises, which were, following the Revolutionary War, important tools for spreading the word about the theories and mechanics of horticulture. (Before in dependence, there were no established means by which farmers could share information with each other. But in the new republic, Americans created agricultural societies and farming organizations to report their findings on issues such as fertilization, pest control, and pruning—issues that had, until then, been mostly neglected.)

  In 1790, William Prince oversaw the first significant experiment in American fruit breeding, when he planted twenty-five quarts of pits taken from an orchard of open-pollinated greengage plums. (Open pollination is done by birds, bees, wind, or some other natural force that leaves the pollen source unclear.) Of the thousands of pits that he planted, Prince selected only a handful of productive offspring, though four of these lasted for many years. He called them the White Gage, the Red Gage, Prince’s Gage, and Washington, the last in honor of the first president of the new republic.

  By the early nineteenth century, plums had rumbled out onto the American frontier. Wild plums had been there all along, but as settlers went west, they began to cultivate native and European plums. In 1814, a man named William Dodd, who had served under Andrew Jackson in the Tennessee militia, planted plum pits at a farm near Knoxville. The pits Dodd planted had come from either a local Creek chief or the banks of the nearby Tallapoosa River. Either way, they were a variety of Prunus hortulana, another native plum species. One of the offspring bore fruit and was propagated, initially, under the name Old Hickory (and then, also, General Jackson). In 1824, Dodd and his brother relocated to Illinois, taking some Old Hickory budwood with them. Dodd settled in Springfield, where the variety became known as William Dodd and Chickasaw Chief. His brother moved north to Galena, where his plum was called the Hinckley. Meanwhile, the same plum had somehow ended up in Pennsylvania, where a man named Miner got his hands on it and disseminated it in large enough numbers that it came to be known as the Miner plum and was recognized as the first distinct variety of domesticated native plum. It was prized mostly for its hardiness in climates too cold for other common varieties. In a lukewarm endorsement of the plum, the editors of one journal in Wisconsin wrote that “it must be quite obvious that the Miner plum cannot even be considered second rate in quality. Still, on the principle that half a loaf is better than no bread at all, it may be safely recommended to those who have neither the time nor the opportunity to grow finer fru
it.”

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  JULIUS MILTON TOOK no fruit with him when he set out for California after the American Civil War. Having enlisted in the Confederate States Army at the age of sixteen, Julius had served as courier for Brigadier General Rufus Barringer of North Carolina. At the war’s end, with the South in tatters, Julius sailed by way of the Isthmus of Panama. He landed in San Francisco and began ranching near Stockton. By the 1890s, he had saved enough money to buy forty acres from the railroad in the town of Parlier, in southern Fresno County, just west of the Kings River. He ran sheep over the thousands of uninhabited acres between his ranch and the Sierran foothills. He started off growing mostly alfalfa, but by 1900, he’d also planted some grape vines and stone fruit, probably an old peach variety like the Muir, something that he could dry. From there, he moved to canning peaches like the Orange Cling and the Palora. The entry on Julius in the Historical and Biographical Record of the San Joaquin Valley, published in 1905, noted that in addition to “carrying stock in the Grower’s Winery at Parlier,” Julius was “interested in all movements pertaining to the general community in which he [made] his home.”

  You could say the same about Rod Milton, one of Julius’s great grandsons. The California Tree Fruit Agreement is the growers’ organization for peaches, plums, and nectarines in the state, and Rod has, at one time or another, volunteered to serve as the organization’s chairman, as its vice-chairman, and as a member of its Executive Committee, Peach Commodity Committee, Nectarine Administrative Committee, California Plum Marketing Board, Research Subcommittee, Tree Fruit Quality Subcommittee, and several other ad hoc committees and task forces. (He’s also a regular churchgoer and hunting safety instructor.) On the CTFA Web site, Rod’s “Meet the Grower” page says: “According to Rod, he wants each variety to create an experience that ranks with a first kiss, a grandma’s smile, the last day of school, and outside fastballs over the right field fence.”