The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world Read Online Free PDF Page B

of place-names that quickly thins to blankness. The maps force you to think of Ohio in an unaccustomed way, no longer as a middle but as a beginning, an edge. That, of course, was what this place was in 1801, when Chapman first stood here: America’s threshold place, the cliff of everything unknown and yet to be—unless, of course, you happened to be a Delaware or Wyandot, for whom the very notion of wilderness was an error or a lie. But for a white American in 1801, Marietta was the last stop before stepping over the edge.
     
     
    In 1801 one of the things you could buy in Marietta before heading into the interior was apple trees. Soon after his arrival, Rufus Putnam had himself planted a nursery on the opposite bank of the Ohio, so that he might sell trees to the pioneers passing through. What was surprising about this was that the apples Putnam sold were not grown from seeds: they were grafted trees. In fact, his nursery offered a selection of the well-known eastern varieties—the Roxbury Russets, Newtown Pippins, and Early Chandlers that had already made their names in colonial New England.
    What this meant, of course, was that John Chapman’s apples were neither the first in Ohio nor by any stretch the best, for his were seedling trees exclusively. Chapman, somewhat perversely, would have nothing to do with grafted trees. “They can improve the apple in that way,” he’s supposed to have said, “but that is only a device of man, and it is wicked to cut up trees that way. The correct method is to select good seeds and plant them in good ground and God only can improve the apple.”
    So what, exactly, was unique about Chapman’s operation, and why did it succeed? Apart from his almost fanatical devotion to apples planted from seed, his business was distinguished by its portability: his willingness to pack up and move his apple tree operation to keep pace with the ever-shifting frontier. Like a shrewd real estate developer (which is one way to describe him), Chapman had a sixth sense for exactly where the next wave of development was about to break. There he would go and plant his seeds on a tract of waterfront land (sometimes paid for, sometimes not), confident in the expectation that a few years hence a market for his trees would appear at his doorstep. By the time the settlers came, he’d have two- to three-year-old trees ready for sale at six and a half cents apiece. Chapman was evidently the only appleman on the American frontier pursuing such a strategy. It would have large consequences for both the frontier and the apple.
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    If a man had the temperament for it and didn’t care about starting a family or putting down roots, selling apple trees along the shifting edge of the frontier was not a bad little business. Apples were precious on the frontier, and Chapman could be sure of a strong demand for his seedlings, even if most of them would yield nothing but spitters. He was selling, cheaply, something everybody wanted—something, in fact, everybody in Ohio needed by law. A land grant in the Northwest Territory specifically required a settler to “set out at least fifty apple or pear trees” as a condition of his deed. The purpose of the rule was to dampen real estate speculation by encouraging homesteaders to put down roots. Since a standard apple tree normally took ten years to fruit, an orchard was a mark of lasting settlement.
    An orchard is also an idealized or domesticated version of a forest, and the transformation of a shadowy tract of wilderness into a tidy geometry of apple trees offered a visible, even stirring, proof that a pioneer had mastered the primordial forest. Compared to the awesome majesty of the old-growth trees the early settlers encountered, the modesty of an apple tree, the way it obligingly takes on the forms we give it, holding out its fruit and flowers so near to hand, must have been a tremendous comfort on the frontier.
    That’s one reason planting an orchard