Emily Pawley
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226693835
- eISBN:
- 9780226693972
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226693972.003.0008
- Subject:
- History, Environmental History
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
John A. Stempien and John Linstrom (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781501740237
- eISBN:
- 9781501740275
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501740237.003.0032
- Subject:
- History, Environmental History
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
