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
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