An Orchard Invisible: A Natural History of Seeds
By Jonathan Silvertown
University of Chicago Press £17.50, 216 pages
FT Bookshop price: £14
The Garden of Invention: Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants
By Jane S Smith
The Penguin Press $25.95, 354 pages
Forgotten Fruits: The Stories Behind Britain’s Traditional Fruit and Vegetables
By Christopher Stocks
Windmill £8.99, 298 pages
FT Bookshop price: £7.19
Seeds
are everywhere: one square metre of cultivated ground can contain tens
of thousands. Yet these humble, apparently insignificant objects are
among the most amazing pieces of organic matter on the planet. Many are
delicious to eat; others provide us with oil, drugs and poisons. We all
know that an acorn can grow into a mighty oak. We may be less familiar
with the seeds of orchids, light as dust, that need to spend their
first few years as parasites on fungi, or the largest seed in the
world, the bomb-sized nut of the coco de mer coconut.
The
history of seeds, seedlings and varieties of plants has been little
told, considering both its captivating strangeness and its immense
importance to the human race. What is especially fascinating and
pertinent in this history is the intersection of biology, culture,
politics, commerce and sheer amateurish improvisation. Each of these
three books, by a biologist, a cultural historian, and a gardener,
tells the story from different perspectives: biological, cultural,
political and commercial. The overall narrative is one of increasing
human control over nature, which at first led to a vision of unlimited
variety in the late 19th century and then, a century on, to the more
anxiety-inducing prospect of uncontrolled bioengineering in which the
genetic manipulation of plants seems to lead inexorably to the genetic
manipulation of humans.
First is the story of how seeds have
evolved – over aeons of time, through natural selection, and without
human intervention – to develop the varied properties that astonish us
today. Then comes a pivotal moment in the 1870s: the remarkable career
of the plant breeder Luther Burbank, who was the first to see how
speeding up unnatural selection could drastically alter and improve the
properties of plants. It was Burbank who, unwittingly, prepared the
ground for such developments as transgenic technology, which dominate
discussions of plant breeding today. The arrival of commercially driven
breeding and planting has often resulted in higher yields and more
reliable crops but has also led to the loss of many traditional
varieties.
Jonathan Silvertown, professor of ecology at the UK’s
Open University, has answered two fundamental but complex questions:
what are seeds and how have they evolved? An Orchard Invisible
contains some dense scientific argument but Silvertown, who is
fascinated by the evolutionary strategies of seeds, nevertheless
succeeds in making his enthusiasm infectious enough to attract the
general reader.
He describes a seed as being like “an embryo in a
picnic box”. The seeds of land plants, all of which derive from a
single marine ancestor, require their own food supply: this is
“endosperm”, which according to the most likely theory is a kind of
aborted embryo within the seed vessel that feeds its sibling. If that
sounds somewhat obscure, Silvertown reminds us that endosperm has
become vital to human existence: it makes up most of the kernel of food
grains such as rice, wheat and corn. “Sixty per cent of the world’s
food supply is made up of this tissue,” Silvertown says.
The
history of evolution is exciting not least because it is a story of sex
– for plants as well as animals. The sex lives of seeds and plants,
little understood until the 18th century, are stranger and more varied,
however. Unlike us, some plants can reproduce asexually but sexual
reproduction, in the case of flowering plants through pollination,
remains the most popular route. Yes, even Boston beans do it.
Sexual
reproduction has evolutionary advantages for plants. One reason nearly
all the elms in Britain were wiped out by Dutch elm disease was that
all these trees were descended from a single clone, perhaps in the form
of a set of cuttings, brought over by the Romans when they invaded. The
species reproduced clonally rather than sexually, with insufficient
genetic diversity to combat the disease.
For the non-specialist
reader the anecdotal evidence gathered here about the sheer weird
wonder of seeds – their ability, say, to survive for thousands of
years, or their sensitivity to colour changes – may be more winning
than the more technical arguments about evolutionary strategy. One of
the best properties of seeds, Silvertown reminds us, is that they can
fly – helpful in terms of evolutionary strategy, no doubt, but also
instructive in the evolution of human flight: the Wright Brothers’
pioneering aircraft, which took to the skies in 1903, was inspired by a
seed, not a bird.
Unsurprisingly, Darwin looms large in the seed
story. The great scientist’s 1869 study “The Variation of Animals and
Plants under Domestication” inspired the most famous plant breeder in
history, Luther Burbank, who became a national institution in the US on
a par with his friends Thomas Edison and Henry Ford.
Born in
1849, Burbank was a shy, dreamy young man working in a plough factory
in Massachusetts when he came across Darwin’s book on animal and plant
breeding a year or two after it was published. As he later said, the
book “opened a new world to me. It told me that variations [in plants]
seemed to be susceptible, through selection, of permanent fixture in
the individual.” By selecting, grafting and hybridising, as cultural
historian Jane Smith tells us in her excellent biography, The Garden of Invention,
a clever plant breeder might not simply improve an existing stock but
create new varieties, whose properties would persist through
generations.
This had happened before but more by chance than
design. Burbank was original in refining the methods beyond anything
previously achieved. He described his work in surprisingly lyrical
terms: “We have learnt that [plant species] are as plastic in our hands
as clay in the hands of the potter or colour on the artist’s canvas and
can readily be moulded into more beautiful forms than any painter or
sculptor can ever hope to bring forth.”
Burbank’s first great
success was with potato seeds. Growing Early Rose potatoes on his small
farm, he noticed a seed ball dangling from one of the plants. He marked
the plant, waited for the seed ball to ripen, then went back to collect
it, only to discover the thing had dropped off. He spent three days
searching for it – time not spent in vain. His experiments with the 23
seeds contained in the matured seed ball he eventually recovered and
propagated were the foundation of his remarkable career. Just one of
the seeds gave rise to the Russet Burbank potato, one of the most
important commercial varieties in the world, used, for example, by
McDonald’s. Now, in a development that Burbank would never have
anticipated, the Russet Burbank has been genetically modified by
agricultural company Monsanto to create the Bt “New Leaf” Russet
Burbank.
The Russet Burbank may have made Luther Burbank’s name
but, although he made a good living from selling to nurseries, it did
not make his fortune – it would not be possible to patent plants until
four years after Burbank’s death in 1926. Despite this, Burbank’s
ability, or even genius, as a plant breeder was not in question,
despite methods that defied system. Over his long career in Santa Rosa,
California, where he lived for the last 50 years of his life, he bred
and sold new varieties of plums, blackberries, quinces, cherries,
strawberries, rhubarb, walnuts, daisies, lilies and sunflowers. Many of
these varieties are still of commercial importance today.
Burbank’s
advances in plant breeding won him heroic status as a benefactor of
mankind, combined with a Tolstoyan aura as a humble gardener. It also
made him the locus of competing interests, one of which was science.
Burbank’s relationship with the fast-developing world of science was
complex and ambiguous, and makes up the most thought-provoking episodes
of Smith’s biography.
Science wanted to appropriate Burbank, or
at least put his wonderful discoveries on a scientific, replicable,
basis. But Burbank himself, though courting scientific respectability,
was also ambivalent about it, for a variety of reasons. One was that
his attitude to nature was not purely scientific but more profoundly
derived from his study of the Transcendentalist philosophers and nature
lovers Emerson and Thoreau. Asked to give a scientific paper, he
shocked his audience by speaking in a proto-New Age language about
“vibrating energies”. The second reason was more practical: there was
an obvious clash between the scientific ideal of the free sharing of
knowledge and the instincts of a commercial plant breeder.
Burbank
felt he should have been able to benefit more from his discoveries and
was a vociferous proponent of the extension of patent law to plants.
But one wonders what the Emersonian gardener would have made of the
brave new world of transgenic technology as practised by Monsanto and
others, where the protection of patent has led to the possibility of
monopolising entire food chains.
There seems to be something
innocent about Burbank’s lifelong work of plant breeding, summed up by
the chef and Slow Food guru Alice Waters: “There’s nothing wrong with
improving plants. Luther Burbank ... did that. But he didn’t violate
nature doing it.” To put it another way, it’s hard to imagine that
Burbank would breed varieties designed to look good and last for ever
but that taste of practically nothing, like those that fill so many
supermarket shelves. Forgotten Fruits, by Christopher Stocks, a
former gardening writer at the Independent on Sunday, is a portrait of
the varieties we have lost, or are in danger of losing, as a result of
plant-breeding, which has prioritised convenience over individuality.
It is also designed as an inspiration and spur to contemporary
horticulturalists to go out and plant them.
Most of this
attractively anecdotal book consists of a glossary of tasty traditional
varieties of fruit and vegetables that have fallen out of favour. In
our age of plenty, it is fascinating to learn than we subsist on a much
more restricted palette of crops than our Victorian ancestors. A
leading British seed company that offers 12 varieties of peas today
offered 53 in 1853. As well as this severe diminution in diversity,
there has also been a drastic reduction in the acreage of the country’s
orchards: around two-thirds of the country’s apple plantations
disappeared between 1950 and 2000. This has led to the mass importing
of apples from countries such as New Zealand, South Africa and Chile.
One
of Stocks’ most important points is made in passing; many of these
valuable varieties, some of which are making a comeback, were bred,
more or less accidentally, by amateurs. That is where Darwin, the
gentleman scientist, Luther Burbank, the artistic plant breeder, and
the retired brewer Richard Cox, who bred the Cox’s Orange Pippin, join
forces. In their different ways, each celebrated the immense natural
variety of plants and their seeds. None would have welcomed a world in
which that variety and biodiversity were sacrificed to the streamlined
efficiency of mass-market monocultures. But that is only one possible
outcome in the long, twisting tale of humanity’s relationship with
plants.
harry.eyres@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/eyres
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