Who are the dreamers and game changers of the fruit world, and what were their contributions? I feel like there are a lot of important people who go unheard of. The known ones that come to mind for me are:
Luther Burbank and his breeding and importing work
Floyd Zaiger, who carried the Burbank torch
Neil Peterson for the cultivation of pawpaws
Jerry Lehman for his work on persimmons
Albert Etter for his work with red fleshed apples
Skillcult for his advancement of Etter’s work
John Bunker identifying and preserving old apples
Wes Jackon’s work on perennial grains
I’m sure there are others. If you can think of anyone, let us know who they are and what they’ve done.
Walter Tennyson Swingle Did a lot of work related to citrus (credited with Tangelo, swingle citrumelo, etc) N.E. Hansen Fruit explorer and breeder did a lot of work creating varieties for prairie
northwest (Toka plum, Waneta plum, Dolgo crab apple)
Nick Botner, Tom Brown, Lee Calhoun.
Special thanks to David Vernon and others who have made the old heirloom apple varieties available to us to buy and enjoy. Derek Mills also has a lot of great heirloom apples.
Maybe not a legend of the fruit world, but his story is too good not to share:
Antoine-Augustin Parmentier
from Wikipedia:
“French pharmacist and agronomist, best remembered as a vocal promoter of the potato as a food source for humans in France and throughout Europe. His many other contributions to nutrition and health included establishing the first mandatory smallpox vaccination campaign (under Napoleon) beginning in 1805, when he was Inspector-General of the Health Service) and pioneering the extraction of sugar from sugar beets. Parmentier also founded a school of breadmaking and studied methods of conserving food, including refrigeration.”
“While serving as an army pharmacist for France in the Seven Years’ War, he was captured by the Prussians, and in prison in Prussia was faced with eating potatoes, known to the French only as hog feed. The potato had been introduced from South America to Europe by the Spaniards at the beginning of the 16th century. It was introduced to the rest of Europe by 1640 but (outside Spain and Ireland) was usually used only for animal feed. King Frederick II of Prussia had required peasants to cultivate the plants under severe penalties and had provided them with cuttings. In 1748 France had actually forbidden the cultivation of the potato (on the grounds that it was thought to cause leprosy among other things), and this law remained on the books in Parmentier’s time, until 1772.”
“From his return to Paris in 1763 he pursued his pioneering studies in nutritional chemistry. His prison experience came to mind in 1772 when he proposed (in a contest sponsored by the Academy of Besancon) use of the potato as a source of nourishment for dysenteric patients. He won the prize on behalf of the potato in 1773.”
“Due largely to Parmentier’s efforts, the Paris Faculty of Medicine declared potatoes edible in 1772. Still, resistance continued, and Parmentier was prevented from using his test garden at the Invalides hospital, where he was pharmacist, by the religious community that owned the land, whose complaints resulted in the suppression of Parmentier’s post at the Invalides.”
“Parmentier then began a series of publicity stunts for which he remains notable today, hosting dinners at which potato dishes featured prominently and guests included Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier. He gave bouquets of potato blossoms to the king and queen, and surrounded his potato patch at Sablons with armed guards during the day to suggest valuable goods, withdrawing them at night so people could steal the potatoes.”
These names also come to mind, but I’m sure I can think of others:
Ivan Michurin - for introducing over 300 varieties of fruit
Roger Meyer - for importing many varieties of jujube to the US
Shengrui Yao - for researching jujubes, importing many varieties to the US, and promoting them in the US
Lee Reich - author and promoter of uncommon fruits
Les Kerr [quote=“clarkinks, post:6, topic:20885”]
Dr. Les Kerr began intercrossing Prunus cerasus and P. fruiticosa at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s Morden Research Center. Later, as director of the PFRA Tree Nursery (now Forestry Farm Park), in Saskatoon, he released and promoted a cold-hardy bush sour cherry that was never named.
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Harold Olmo: If you have ever eaten table grapes from the supermarket or drunk wine produced in the US, you have benefited, directly or indirectly, from Olmo’s work. We are still using the accessions he collected in the southern US, northern Mexico, and Central Asia to breed for things like Pierce’s disease resistance.
Dr. Robert T. Dunstan, born in NC and worked in Virginia and Florida. He created the Dunstan citrumelo and the blight-resistant Dunstan chestnut. He also did a good bit of work on breeding phylloxera resistant grape rootstocks.
Arkadi Konstantinovich Pasenkov, born in the Russian Empire in what is now Kazakhstan and worked at the Nikitski Botanical Garden in Yalta in what is now, uhh, Crimea. He crossed American and Asian persimmons and bred a number of hybrids including Rosseyanka. His work lead to, among other things, about a quarter of this forum’s content (y’all need to chill it with these thousands of posts long hybrid persimmon threads).
A bit more about Pasenkov, since it’s hard to get any information about him in English:
He ended up working for a while in Tomsk, in Siberia, enlisted in the Pacific Navy during WWII and fought the Japanese in Manchuria, worked in Batumi in Georgia for a number of years before moving to Yalta, and actually worked on quite a few different species, not just persimmons. He is most well-known for persimmons, but did a lot of breeding work on walnuts (apparently crossing pecans and walnuts?!) did some breeding work on feijoas and published papers on feijoa vegetative propagation propagation.
George Washington Carver for creating many useful peanut products.
Robert Zehnder for dozens of hybrids between muscadine and table grapes.
T.V. Munson for his hot climate grape hybrids.
Peter Gideon for ‘Wealthy’ apple and others, bringing eating apples to the upper prairie.
I will nominate my friend Mark Albert for his work in breeding and popularizing feijoas all across California and beyond.
You would see him in every CRFG scion exchange with a ton of scionwood of every one of his top varieties.
Unfortunately he passed away suddenly and it was a shock to everyone who knew him.
Elmer Swenson (12 December 1913 – 24 December 2004) was an American pioneering grape breeder who introduced a number of new cultivars, effectively revolutionizing grape growing in the Upper Midwest of the United States and other cold and short-seasoned regions.
My favorites:
Swenson Red (cotton candy taste) Somerset seedless (taste like the reds from california) and
Brianna (pineapple flavor)
all hardy to -20F
John Hershey is a massive influence on what I do with my nursery. Looking for outstanding genetics of amazing nut and fruit trees, both for people, livestock and wildlife. Neil Peterson and Jerry Lehman are two huge inspirations for me as well. They dedicated their lives to some very overlooked trees and made some amazing cultivars from them.
Michael Phillip’s ‘Holistic Orchard’ blew my mind about the possibilities of growing apples, peaches, pears atc. His work has been a game-changer in my food forest!
Joseph D. Postman - there are plenty of great pears that would not be available to Americans, if it were not for him.
“For more than 35 years, as the Genebank Curator, and as the ‘plant pathologist’ for the USDA’s Corvallis, Oregon portion of the ‘Agricultural Research Service’, it was in part Joseph’s job to find, to eat fruit from, to select, to organize, to care for, and to present one of the largest collection of pear trees in the world, pear trees that originated from around the world, he helped to create the living ‘World Pear Collection’, representing the genetic diversity of pear cultivars and species. So despite him having personal preferences just like everyone else, his opinion still is very valuable, since he’s such an expert who has tried fruit from so many different varieties.”
