Purposeful Planting

Fay Mitchell

Many home gardeners are blooming with the warm weather and stay-at-home directives during the coronavirus pandemic. Doubtless, locally grown carrots, onions, and cabbage will be harvested soon. Diane Smith, site manager at Bennett Place State Historic Site in Durham, already has planted cabbage, radishes, collards, and spinach, although the site is closed because of the pandemic. But she also has experimented with special tomatoes — purple, and white.

Diane aims for foods that could have been present in the 1860s garden of James and Nancy Bennett. Wonder White tomatoes will be in this year’s garden, but Cherokee Purple has the year off. The Bennetts probably did not grow purple or white tomatoes, but they may have been available at the time. Dating the white variety is less certain but rumors date it to the Civil War era, while other information dates it to the 1990s. The Wonder White is mid-sized, creamy colored with hints of melon flavors and a meaty texture.

Cherokee Purple came from seeds given to a woman in Tennessee who said they had been in her family for 100 years and were received from Cherokee Indians. She gave some to a neighbor and in 1990 they found their way to Craig LeHouiller, a known tomato connoisseur in North Carolina who works with Seed Savers Exchange.

“I didn’t have luck with some of the heirlooms I planted in the past, but the purple ones did come in and were pretty neat to see,” Smith says. “This year I will give planting the white tomatoes another try.”

The Cherokee Purple is not so pretty. It has bulges and shades of brown, green and purple. It’s the flavor that’s special, a balance of sweet, acid, and savory, with a hint of smoke. The tomatoes also have been raised in the Victory Garden at the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History, which finds it conceivable that Cherokee were raising tomatoes in Tennessee 100 years ago.

There are hundreds of types of fruit that for most of us are unfamiliar. Seed Savers Exchange has been working to track, preserve and trade heritage varieties of flowers, fruit, vegetables and nuts for more than 40 years.

Seed Savers published a Nursery Trade Census that was an inventory of heirloom fruit and nut varieties in 2015 and found 256 varieties of pear, 148 of nectarine and 100 varieties of pecans, among other findings. It also found 7,945 varieties altogether which was down from 8,750 varieties in 2009, but almost twice the number found in 1988.

While vegetables are usually grown from plants or seeds, trees are usually propagated by grafted cuttings attached to the rootstock to become clones of the mother tree. That is the process of the Southern Heritage Apple Orchard at Horne Creek Historical Farm in Pinnacle.

In 1997, Lee Calhoun grafted 400 apple varieties from his old southern heirloom apple orchard and gifted two trees of each to the state historic site. The 800 trees were a prized gift to the site and the public as trees continue to be grafted at Horne Creek.

The apple collection at Horne Creek is one of the most important in the country, and along with the Cornell University apple collection in Geneva, N.Y., is a resource not only for historic purposes but also for modern apple uses. And, because about 98% of the varieties in the SHAO are no longer sold commercially, the orchard is a genetic repository of international significance.

Calhoun and his wife Edith located many of these varieties, of which he wrote, “Let me point out something about the apple orchard at Horne Creek Farm that is not appreciated…for about 200 of these apple varieties Horne Creek Farm has the only known living trees. The original old tree found by Edith and me of each of these 200 varieties has long since died and was the only surviving tree of that variety ever found.”

“This gift is a valuable source of information for home gardeners, commercial apple growers and cider makers, and anyone interested in the history of our region,” Horne Creek Site Manager Lisa Turney points out. “We are humbled and grateful that Lee, author of “‘ Old Southern Apples,’” shared his vast knowledge and trees with us. His legacy lives on and is in safe hands.”

The donation of the trees has the largest monetary value ever received by the site and was a priceless gift to the state’s agricultural heritage.

The next time you are apple shopping and choosing from Red Delicious, Gala, or Fuji, just think of Hewes Crab, Dula’s Beauty, Royal Limbertwig, and hundreds of other varieties you will not see unless you travel to Horne Creek. If you buy apples or a tree there you will contribute to plant diversity and help the site continue its work.

There are compelling reasons to grow heritage plants. Plant diversity is first among them, as a large gene pool helps defend against pests and diseases, even blights or pandemics; or cope with various environmental conditions such as heat or flood. In changing climatic conditions that could be critical. Another reason is to preserve regional culture and history, and relationships to a specific time or place.

The coronavirus pandemic means state historic sites are closed until further notice. A skeletal staff maintains as necessary plants and animals in their care. Let’s hope that we can visit sometime and see white tomatoes at Bennett Place and a bounty of apples at Horne Creek.