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  • A Whole World in an Apple Seed
  • Ruth Schwartz Cowan (bio)
Philip Pauly . Fruits and Plains: the Horticultural transformation of America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. xi + 329 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. 39.95.

Upon reading Fruits and Plains I had the same reaction that Huxley had upon reading The Origin of Species: "How stupid of me not to have thought of that."

Not that I believe this book is going to create a startling intellectual revolution (although it would be nice if it did) but rather that Phil Pauly's central insight—that culture can be read through horticultural practices and ideologies—is one that I wish I had had myself. Archeologists know that horticulture is part of culture, of course; but historians have paid little heed to this notion, even historians like me, who couple disciplinary training with a passion for gardening.

Fruits and Plains is both unique and innovative; there is simply nothing else in the secondary literature which is anything like it. Part of what Pauly undertakes is the history of some unknown, but historically crucial, institutions, such as the Massachusetts Horticultural Society or the federal Bureau of Plant Quarantine. Another part is the history of ideas about botanical patriotism—about what it meant, at various times and places, to distinguish native from immigrant plants: imported when? in prehistory or in the seventeenth century? on purpose or by accident? from England or from China? In some chapters Pauly is concerned with the history of garden design, in others with the evolution of plant and insect species or the history of a particular environment (such as the swamps of the Everglades or the prairies of the Midwest), in yet others with attempts to eradicate plant and insect pests. He is marvelously adept at all these very different forms of historical inquiry. There are, of course, secondary works that deal with each of these topics separately, works such as William Cronon's Changes in the Land, Alfred Crosby's Ecological Imperialism, or Ronald Tobey's Saving the Prairies—but I know of no other that has tried to encompass them all.

Pauly covers a great deal of territory, both temporal and physical: from the 1730s to the 1990s; from temperate climes to tropical ones; from early [End Page 181] nineteenth-century Boston to late twentieth-century Florida and California. He starts, appropriately enough, with the eighteenth-century discussion of botanical degeneracy—the then widely held notion that the New World was inhabited by degenerate forms of Old World species—and ends with the 1990s controversies about how best to control such exotic invasives as kudzu and the Mediterranean fruit fly. In between there are chapters on an amazing variety of topics, with evidence drawn from an extraordinary variety of primary sources. In one chapter Pauly uses the correspondence and journals of Thomas Jefferson, John Morgan, George Washington, Joseph Banks, and Samuel Mitchell to explain why the very first apparently imported insect pest, which devastated late eighteenth-century wheat harvests, was named after the mercenaries who accompanied the British forces: Hessian fly. In the next chapter (probably my favorite), based largely on articles in specialist journals of the time, we discover how various nineteenth-century horticulturists attempted to improve native American fruits (remember Johnny Appleseed?)—and how it came to pass that one of their creations, the suitably named "Concord" grape, became, as wine, the liturgical preference of a group of people the breeders would have found entirely alien: Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Suffice it to say, without further listing of the contents of the remaining chapters, that Pauly's coverage is extremely broad and his research both extensive and deep.

Pauly is everywhere alert to the multiple meanings and implications of words, an historical method that he did not use in most of his previous publications. In an early chapter of Fruits and Plains, he notes, for example, that the Boston Brahmins and Harvard professors who, in the 1820s, started a private association to distribute prized fruit-tree cuttings sent from London and Kew, thought of themselves as "horticulturists" rather than "agriculturists" or even "orchardists" because they wanted others to view them as pursuing these activities for...

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