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Chapter 7 examines how new improving organisms, fruit trees, moved into the landscape through commercial networks. Between 1820 and 1850, fruit landscapes changed dramatically—semi-wild seedlings gave way to named varieties, each the product of cuttings from a single tree. Fruit trees became relatively cheap markers of rural refinement, which sometimes descended traceably from aristocratic gardens, but also filled commercial orchards planted for domestic and global markets. Since fruit varieties reproduced only through human networks, they can show us the rising dominance of the nurserymen who came to refer to themselves as “pomologists.” Nurserymen struggled to create markets for named fruit, because varieties were easily confused and counterfeited and shifted their character as they were moved. Nurserymen partially stabilized varieties through the writing of books of description, the creation of profiles and systems of taste, and then finally, through huge pomological conventions at which they battled over and rated fruit. Their efforts to fix value borrowed from other features of the antebellum economy, like counterfeit detectors, and credit ratings. Ultimately, tensions between marketability and connoisseurship produced at best, uneasy compromises about the nature of value, compromises continually disturbed by the stream of novelties on which the tree market depended.

Several solitary bee species in the genus Osmia have been studied as potential pollinators of fruit trees and other early-blooming crops. Methods to manage large populations in agro-ecosystems have been developed for at least three species. This chapter reviews current knowledge on the life cycle of Osmia and emphasizes the need to establish a solid ecophysiological basis to develop adequate rearing methods for these species. Two phenological events — the timing of adult diapause in the autumn, and the timing of emergence in the spring — require particular attention when managing Osmia populations. The timing of adult diapause is critical because pre-wintering temperatures have a profound effect on fat body depletion, winter survival, and vigor at emergence. Timing of emergence and its synchronization with bloom of the target crop is important to maximize pollination and production of bee progeny. Both events can be adjusted with proper temperature management.

The close relation with a fruit tree and its home-production, "is one of the sacred associations" for Bailey in this chapter. This chapter also gives a brief overview of the history of late 19th-century American pomology, or the study of fruit gardening, citing authors Patrick Berry and Charles Downing who celebrated this same ideal, specifically the "sacred associations" with pear and apple trees.

This chapter focuses on the different aspects of fruit-tree domestication, and its difference with grain crop agriculture. Grains and crops can be moved from one place to another after the harvest, which makes them suitable for cultivators who transfer to other places after harvest. In contrast, fruit trees are perennials. For example, orchards start to bear fruit three to eight years after planting, and reach full productivity several years later. Therefore, it needs protection from intruders the year round, requiring cultivators to have a settled way of life. This chapter also studies the cultivation of fruit trees and nuts including olive, grapevine, fig, sycamore, date palm, pomegranate, apple, pear, plum, and cherries.

This chapter examines the industrial accident crisis that arose in the early twentieth century by offering a reading of Edith Wharton's 1907 novel, The Fruit of the Tree in relation to Crystal Eastman's influential study of industrial injuries, Work Accidents and the Law (1910). The feminization of chance—in which modern conceptions of chance challenged masculine fantasies of power, self-sufficiency, and control—opened the door to important progressive reforms implemented by and for women. Both Wharton and Eastman were interested in industrial accidents around the peak of the accident problem in 1907, and thus can be read in relation to an influential reform movement known as “welfare maternalism.” Eastman's study came at a critical juncture in the work safety debate and shows how male workers attempted to rehabilitate their liberal capacities through strategic self-endangerment. Wharton's The Fruit of the Tree reveals that women also practiced a similar strategy.

The origins of the cultivation and domestication of many fruit, legume, and cereal crops can be traced to the eastern fringe of the Mediterranean region where the ‘Fertile Crescent’ blends into the western steppe zones of the Irano–Turanian floristic province. This chapter describes this early cultivation and domestication and the traces of migration of domesticated species across the Mediterranean in the hands of human populations. The evolution of Mediterranean crops, flowers, and fruit trees during the process of domestication has involved an amazing diversity of species. Their patterns of differentiation across the Mediterranean often resemble those of wild species treated in chapter 3. This chapter also discusses the important links between human populations and plants and the growing interdependencies of these links.

This chapter begins by discussing the importance of gardens in the medieval food culture. Gardens, like fields, were crucial to the supply of food, and passing on a knowledge of plants and their potential as food products was essential. Fruit trees were often to be found in these gardens. These fruits vary from apples known as blaunderels, costards, pippins, queenings, red stars, and Ricardons; pears Jonette, pearmains, and wardens; and there was also a variety of white plum. Aside from fruits, there were also herb gardens designed to provide pot herbs and flavourings as well as herbs for medicinal use. The chapter then turns to wild foods such as berries. It also looks at the significance of fish and studies the practice of hunting and wildfowling.

Why do macroeconomists usually work with models that seem, to many, to be ridiculous simplifications of reality that stress mathematical coherence over economic substance? This chapter addresses important aspects of macroeconomic methodology. These ideas are infrequently discussed in existing work for nonprofessional economists. There are some reasons for using an overall approach to macroeconomics that seems to give easy ammunition to critics. The chapter covers each of these four “sins”: Aggregation, Rationality, Equilibrium, and Mathematics.