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  • Fruits and Plains: The Horticultural Transformation of America
  • Steven Stoll
Fruits and Plains: The Horticultural Transformation of America. By Philip J. Pauly (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2007) 336 pp. $39.95

In the first pages of Fruits and Plains, Pauly argues that horticulture is more than an upmarket word for gardening. Think biotechnology fused [End Page 160] with social engineering, and doused with an optimistic American nationalism, and the result comes close to capturing how Thomas Jefferson, among others, held the word. Pauly takes a subject familiar to historians—how Americans naturalized exotic plants to the conditions of Philadelphia, St. Augustine, and Sacramento—and turns it into a story of accident and ambition, of ideology and the search for utopia. "My goals," Pauly writes, "are to convey the breadth of horticulturists' activities and their struggles to come to grips with landscape, with nationality, and with species having agendas of their own" (5).

Pauly opens a metaphorical space, revealing the ways in which Americans transferred the plastic qualities of plant genetics to other realms. Jefferson experimented with people as well as plants; Pauly suggests that Jefferson's "mixing" with Sally Hemings should be seen as cross-pollination, as an extension of Jefferson's thinking about the creation of American cultivars from old-world seeds. Liberty Hyde Bailey believed that foreign pests, like the Hessian fly, served a historical role; they spurred progress through the transformation of wilderness into agrarian clearing in order to destroy the insect's strongholds. Pauly's interpretation is more grounded: Plant-quarantine legislation created a regulatory structure that furthered state formation, as when the United States became the biological protector of Florida's citrus industry.

When a Massachusetts horticulturist named Ephriam Bull found an odd and weedy vine in the corner of his garden, he moved it to the center, pruning and coaxing it until it fruited in 1843. The Concord grape—"large, good-tasting, hardy, and early"—moved from Bull's garden to the cultural center. Bull promoted it for wine and the table, but the grape's fortunes went up and down in the following decades—attacked by parasites and fungi, snubbed for its indelicacy and lack of nuance. Yet it attracted the attention of a New Jersey dentist who pasteurized it for use as a nonalcoholic sacramental wine. Welch's Concord Grape Juice was born. Sam Schapiro, a Jewish immigrant, and the Manischewitz Matzo Co. saw the same potential for mass-produced kosher wine.

Did horticulture transform America? It clearly did more than decorate people's perennial borders. It contributed to cultural identity, national expansion, commercial enterprise, and even religious transcendence. Pauly demonstrates that Americans wanted plants that would make the most of land and labor, plants that added value and helped them to colonize the continent.

Pauly wrote Fruits and Plains during years when he suffered from cancer. He died of the disease on April 2, 2009. The Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis held a memorial seminar a few weeks later to celebrate the book and its author. Those who knew Phil admired his plainspoken criticism and his insistence that environmental history and the history of science exist symbiotically, the one nurtured by the other. [End Page 161]

Steven Stoll
Fordham University
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