High Plains Horticulture: A History

9: Collecting and Creating Hardy Plants

151 p R eaders of Aven Nelson’s “Horticultural Column” in the December 1912 Wyoming Farm Bulletin might have seen the notice about Niels Hansen, secretary of the South Dakota Horticultural Society, as well as professor and horticulturist at the agricultural experiment station in Brookings. “As is well known,” Nelson wrote, Hansen “has succeeded in developing some remarkably promising fruits.” In particular, for the higher elevations of Wyoming, some of Hansen’s creations “work a revolution,” combining the size and quality of tender cultivars with the hardiness of native wild plants. Nelson urged interested readers to get in touch with Hansen personally or with Gurney’s of Yankton, South Dakota, the nursery and seed house that was handling Hansen’s products.1 At one time or another during the first half of the twentieth century, every agricultural experiment station and commercial nursery on the High Plains carried some variety of fruit, vegetable, ornamental, tree, or shrub either introduced from foreign countries by Hansen or developed by him at the 9 Collecting and Creating Hardy Plants 152 Collecting and Creating Hardy Plants South Dakota Agricultural Experiment Station. Indeed, Hansen had gained notoriety, initially because of reports of his adventures as plant explorer in northern Europe and Asia, and then as the result of his successes as selfpromoter . It was said that wherever he traveled, at least in the Dakotas, his first stop was the local newspaper office. Popular national magazines such as Better Homes and Gardens took up his story as plant breeder under headings such as “The [Luther] Burbank of the Plains,” Burbank regarded as America’s leading plant breeder. In all fairness, Hansen was an enormously energetic individual. He developed around 300 varieties of fruits, vegetables, ornamentals, trees, and shrubs; he collected and introduced numerous hardy forage plants and grains—most notably, subspecies of alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.), crested wheat (Agropyron cristatum L. (Gaertn.)), and smooth brome (Bromus inermis Leyss.)—all now naturalized on the High Plains. Born in Denmark, Niels Ebbesen Hansen (1866–1950) immigrated to the United States at age seven with his family, In 1877 they reached Des Moines, Iowa, where his father, an interior decorator, had secured a long-term commission to paint frescoes in the state capitol. The younger Hansen, meanwhile , came to the attention of John A. Hull, Iowa’s secretary of state, who gave him a job as messenger, tutored Hansen in basic subjects, and prepared him to enter college in 1883.2 Iowa Agricultural College was the nearest wellestablished college. Hansen’s decision to major in botany and horticulture remains obscure. Comparing the two disciplines, he wrote his father from college that “in Botany we learn to draw and to know the difference between all the many different types of trees, flowers, etc. In Horticulture we learn to handle and grow raspberries , strawberries, currants, grapes especially and many other small fruits.”3 One senses a preference for the immediate, economic applications of science rather than for the discipline of the search for knowledge in itself. Hansen learned botany from Charles Bessey, who was still at Iowa; as a student assistant, he worked in Bessey’s “experimental garden.” He took a course in “Agriculture” from Seaman Knapp and worked on the college farm under Knapp’s direction. His major professor was the horticulturist Joseph L. Budd (1835–1904), best known for introducing Russian varieties of fruits and shrubs to the Great Plains. Budd was part of that long tradition of Americans searching the world for useful plants, stretching back to 1787 when Thomas Jefferson collected and sent home from Italy the seeds of upland rice. A self-taught expert on fruit culture, Budd had started out as a nurseryman in upstate New York, where he befriended the pomologist Charles Downing Collecting and Creating Hardy Plants 153 (brother of the pioneer landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing). In 1885 Budd inherited Downing’s library and notebooks, still housed at Iowa State University.4 Hansen, in other words, had at his disposal numerous horticultural classics including Alphonse de Candolle’s Origin of Cultivated Plants, of which more follows. After earning the baccalaureate in 1887, Hansen took employment in commercial nurseries. In 1892, Budd invited him back to complete a master’s program and provided him with an assistantship that required both research at the experiment station and service off campus through lectures at Farmers’ Institutes.5 As a graduate student, in 1894 Hansen...