Science: Plant Hunter

In the 1880s, Alfred Russell’ Wallace, great British biologist who originated independently the theory of natural selection at the same time as Charles Darwin, visited the U. S. He lectured at a small agricultural college in Kansas, stayed at the house of the college president. One student who listened to him with particularly wide-eyed wonder was the president’s son, David Fairchild, who had already resolved to be a botanist, was studying parasitic fungi and the wind-borne movements of Kansas tumbleweed.

After Wallace’s unforgettable visit, David’s Uncle Byron, a botanist, took him to Rutgers College for postgraduate work. He entered the Department of Agriculture in 1889, and in the next half century became one of the world’s greatest plant hunters.

Thirsting for travel, David Fairchild obtained a research post at Naples supported by the Smithsonian Institution. On board ship he met a rich, mundivagant Chicagoan named Barbour Lathrop, who became a friend and patron, financed a trip for Fairchild to Java. This was the beginning of travels which took him, eventually as head of the Department of Agriculture’s Division of Foreign Plant Exploration and Introduction, to scores & scores of countries from Finland to Zanzibar. He studied cotton growing in Egypt, bamboo culture in Japan, water chestnuts in China, hops in Bohemia, nuts in England. He brought avocados from Hawaii, mangoes from Bombay, onions from Egypt, mangosteens (a pineapple-apricot-orange-flavored fruit with a dark, tough rind) from Queensland and Java, chayotes (“a delicious vegetable … of the cucumber family”) from Jamaica, chaulmoogra (a leprosy remedy) from Burma. In 1906-07, Fairchild and his staff distributed some 800 tung-oil trees (oil used in varnishes and paints) to pioneer growers in the U. S. South and Southwest.

Once when Fairchild was plant-hunting in the tropics, he was laid low by an infection, almost died. Two of his associates, who realized that he might have taken to his grave the rich story of his experiences, took him back to the U. S., plumped him down on a quiet New Jersey farm, furnished him with a stenographer.

The story of his wanderings and extraordinary discoveries, called The World Was My Garden, was published last week.* Fairchild retired from active service in 1935. Now 69, he lives in Florida. In his early research years at Washington, he met and hobnobbed with many celebrities of that time, including Samuel Langley, William Crawford Gorgas, and Alexander Graham Bell, whose daughter Marian he married. His writing discloses some classic examples of pedagogical quaintness.

When death came to his Aunt Sue, of whom he was very fond, he recalls: “I strove to bury sorrow in work, continuing my investigations of the various rots of the sweet potato.” Some cuttings from The World Was My Garden:

> Bordeaux mixture is so named because the French vine-growers of the Bordeaux region used to spray their plants with copper sulphate and lime—not as a plant medicine but as a deterrent to thieves. An alert viticulturist named Millardet discovered that vines so sprayed were not attacked by downy mildew. David Fairchild and an associate were the first to try out Bordeaux mixture with success on Virginia vineyards.

> Man is not the only animal which raises crops. In Java, Fairchild discovered that termites raise minute fungi for their own nourishment, took several photographs of termite “mushroom gardens.”

> In the Fiji Islands, Fairchild obtained a photograph of a human barbecue. Stones were heated red-hot by a roaring fire, the body of the victim was laid on the stones and garnished with roots of the yam and taro, and the pit was filled with banana leaves until the baking was done.

* Scribner ($3.75).