In Search of New Foods, David Fairchild Changed the Way America Ate.
By Amy Bennett Williams
By rights, David Fairchild should be the patron saint of foodies. Especially because sainthood suits Fairchild so much better than many of the other monikers tossed at him, like “food spy” or “swashbuckling botanist.” Those make him sound like a botanical brigand—a rapacious stalker of growing things, a thief of edible treasures. But not the supremely kindly, public-spirited scientist he was.
So let’s stick with saint, because at its heart, Fairchild’s work was motivated by love—love of the great green world, love of his fellow humans, love of discovery. As for religiosity, the man’s writings indicate he found his raptures in the church of nature: “Is it not probable that we cling so dearly to the idea of our own existence as individuals that we forget we are only a fraction of that vague living something spread out over the earth, moving in millions of places at once which we call a living species?”
It’s hard to overstate how profoundly this horticultural visionary, who died six decades ago in Coconut Grove, influenced what we eat. Mangoes, avocados, quinoa, kale, nectarines, garbanzos, dates, wasabi, clementines, soybeans and seedless grapes—Fairchild traveled the earth to bring them and many thousands of other discoveries to our tables.
Before Fairchild, the young nation’s diet was unimaginably bland. “The menu of an average American dinner includes the product of scarcely a dozen plants,” he noted in 1898, “and yet the number which could be grown for the table would reach into the hundreds. There are several reasons why the number of plants upon which we depend for subsistence remains small…but the most potent one lies in a persistent conservatism of taste.”
Until David Fairchild liberalized our palates. It’s entirely possible you don’t know Fairchild’s name, even
if you’ve feasted on his spoils or heard about Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, the Coral Gables attraction that he inspired. He swapped seeds with Thomas Edison, and Florida literary doyenne Marjory Stoneman Douglas was one of his early biographers; but Fairchild is never ranked among the titans of his time — the Carnegies, the Firestones, the Vanderbilts—though it could be argued he had greater impact.
Unlike other Gilded Age luminaries, David Grandison Fairchild was a botanist. And a bureaucrat.
And a man whose pleasant disposition and sometimes awkward demeanor may have disguised the gritty curiosity required by world travel in those days.
SOMETHING CALLED A MANGO
Fairchild wasn’t born into a landscape of lush exotica. He came into the world on the campus of Michigan State University on April 7, 1869. His educator father, he would later write, “followed the strictest Puritan dogma and doctrine,” and his mother was a Quaker. Both were careful not to overheat
their brood of five (David was the second-youngest) with music or dancing. “Plain living and high thinking” is how Douglas characterized his upbringing in her biography, Adventures in a
Green World, explaining, “His people had been sober-minded intellectuals, idealistic and unworldly.”
When Fairchild was 10, he took the Blue Ribbon Pledge, vowing to abstain from all intoxicating liquor as long as he lived. The same year, his parents moved to Kansas when his father became the first president of its agricultural college. Already, however, the boy was intoxicated by literary exotica: Robinson Crusoe and The Arabian Nights. In his autobiography, The World Was My Garden, he wrote, “Baghdad seemed to be a dream place somewhere in the dim never-never land near Crusoe‘s tropical island.”
At 15, Fairchild began studying horticulture and botany at his father’s school, Kansas College, where he met British adventurer and naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who had sailed the South Seas and written The Malay Archipelago the year Fairchild was born. When Wallace was invited to the Fairchild home, young David was captivated, and his future snapped into focus. Botany could mean more than corn and wheat; it could be a ticket to a life of adventure. That revelation aside, he remained a “slender, awkward, inconspicuous, shy and very serious young man, given over passionately to science,” Douglas writes. After college, he followed his professor uncle, Byron Halsted, to Iowa State Agricultural College. Then it was onto Rutgers University in New Jersey, where scientist Beverly T. Galloway of the newly formed U.S. Department of Agriculture found him to be “a good, clean, lovable, uncomplaining boy.”
Galloway wooed the boy away from his postgraduate studies, offering him a $1,000 annual salary to join her research team. In the summer of 1889, Fairchild arrived in Washington,D.C., to study the maladies that threatened the nation’s crops, such as wheat rust and pear blight. In 1893, the department sent him to Chicago to run its exhibit of plant diseases at the Columbian Exposition, where the ingenious young scientist figured out a way to get pear plants to wilt on command before audiences. When the exposition ended, Fairchild got his first chance to travel overseas by winning a Smithsonian scholarship to study at the zoological station in Naples, Italy. On the Atlantic crossing, Fairchild had a chance meeting with globetrotting Chicago millionaire Barbour Lathrop, then a sometime journalist who had traveled west to cover the aftermath of the Battle of Little Bighorn, Lathrop palled around with the likes of Rudyard Kipling at San Francisco’s storied Bohemian Club, which he considered his home. The older man fascinated Fairchild, who managed to stammer out some questions about the tropics: “I thought he seemed the handsomest and the most severe and yet the most intelligent person I had yet met in my life,” he later wrote.
As a child listening to Burton and Stevenson, Fairchild had been spellbound. He had the same reaction to Lathrop, who told vivid stories about hunting rhinoceroses in Java, surviving tropical fevers and eating a mysterious fruit—“something called a mango.” Though dazzled, Fairchild had no reason to believe he’d
ever encounter Lathrop again, as he set off to begin studying Italian algae. What Fairchild didn’t know was that Lathrop was tiring of the dilettante’s life. He may also have begun thinking about his legacy. His travels had convinced him the world was filled with interesting and useful plants, which he wanted to
bring back to the United States. But Lathrop knew he couldn’t handle such an undertaking alone. He
needed the support of someone with a botanical and agricultural background. Fairchild, he decided, was his man.
ON THE BRINK
Young Fairchild found the scientific ferment at the Naples zoological station inspiring. There was “a feverish but quiet excitement about the place,” where every researcher believed he was on the “brink of
some discovery,” he wrote in 1930’s Exploring for Plants. Plus, after work, there was the food. To
a young man accustomed to boiled meat and potatoes, Italian cuisine was a revelation. Tomatoes (at the time, considered poisonous by many Americans), dried figs and pasta in a riot of shapes—each new flavor and texture more enchanting than the last.
A month into Fairchild’s sojourn, Lathrop turned up with a proposition. He would give the young scientist $1,000 (the spending equivalent of about $33,000 today) so he could go botanize in Java. Stunned, Fairchild told him he wasn’t worthy, that he would need to prepare himself to accept such a gift, which was equal to his USDA salary. “How foolish I would be to go… without a better training,” he wrote. Lathrop said he would wait.
With his savings from his work at the USDA, Fairchild launched a self-directed course of study throughout Europe with feverish ambition, dropping into one university after another to learn about microbiology, molds and plant diseases. Then came a brief detour. A former colleague asked him to procure citron cuttings in Corsica for a California farmer. Never mind that the colleague hadn’t gotten official approval, or that island officials, suspecting he was a spy, tossed Fairchild into jail (until he dug a government check from his pocket and convinced officials it was a passport). It was Fairchild’s first official plant collecting trip, an adventure requiring not only botanical expertise but the willingness to endure hardships and the guile to escape them (a trait likely Fairchild even made Lathrop a USDA “special agent” and put him on the department’s payroll with a $1 annual salary that Lathrop never bothered to collect. In the meantime, Fairchild had wooed Alexander Graham Bell’s daughter, Marian, a liberal-minded art student, after meeting her at one of her famous father’s Wednesday-evening salons in Washington, D.C. They married in 1905. The night before the wedding, he’d written her: “My Marian, my own darling, let’s not forget that like two leaves adrift together we are in the stream of life and let us hope no bars, no shallows, no eddies nor currents are to drive us apart, but we shall reach the open sea.”
IN LOVE WITH FLORIDA
Fairchild’s affection for warm places was lifelong. With no proper tropics in the United States (Hawaii was admitted as a state in 1959, five years after his death) the nation’s subtropics were a fine alternative, one about which Fairchild was prescient. “I was in love with Florida … A land in America where coconuts, pineapples, and mangos would grow must eventually attract settlers,” he wrote. “The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that a tide of immigration would someday flow south [so] I persisted in my desire to introduce tropical plants, maintaining that the southern portion of
Florida would eventually need them for its development.” Florida became a personal and professional priority.
In 1916, the Fairchilds bought eight acres on Biscayne Bay. Lathrop encouraged them to name it the Kampong, the Malay term for a family compound, which it was. Fairchild drew his last breaths of subtropical air at the Kampong 38 years later. He was 85. Although the couple bought the property before Americans entered World War I, they moved there full-time when Fairchild retired in 1928, weaving
themselves into Coconut Grove’s intellectual/creative/ scientific/cultural fabric. They befriended the likes of Marjory Stoneman Douglas and Col. Robert H. Montgomery, a founding partner of the accounting firm Lybrand, Ross Bros. & Montgomery (today PricewaterhouseCoopers), who had begun a palm collection at his Coconut Grove estate with Fairchild’s help.
Douglas was a big Fairchild fan. If not for him, we might not have her celebrated book, The Everglades: River of Grass, and all the momentum it generated, including creating Everglades National Park. “David Fairchild was one of the people who stimulated my interest in local flora and fauna,” Douglas wrote in her autobiography, “which in turn stimulated my interest in the Everglades.” After the Montgomery/Douglas
brainstorm, things moved fast. Never mind that the nation was in the grip of the Great Depression; there was Civilian Conservation Corps labor available, and the founders of the garden, like Montgomery, knew how to get things done. That most of them were wealthy didn’t hurt. Four years later, Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden was dedicated. It is now part of the National Tropical Botanical Garden, a nonprofit focused on tropical plant research, conservation and education that oversees a number of tropical gardens and preserves in Hawaii and Florida. Though he was a little embarrassed at the attention, Fairchild helped fill the grounds with plants and visitors, many of them children.
In a photo from a dedication ceremony, one of his little granddaughters, Helene Pancoast, can be seen up in an African baobab tree. His great-granddaughter Kit Pancoast Nagaumura spent her first four years at the Kampong. She recaptured the magic of that experience in a memoir for the Miami Herald: “The air was, by season, fragrant with tiny white citrus blossoms; or pungent with fallen mangos … I woke into a world where rain thrummed on the fans of palm fronds. I had no idea my first steps were taken in a paradise … My parents and I lived in a tiny efficiency on that expansive property. Beyond that uncomplicated shelter was a playground of sun-dappled growing things. Avocados came in a variety of shapes and densities, from light and lemony to oily and nutty. I learned to swim in a dark unchlorinated pool festooned with sweet ylang-ylang flowers that dropped from trees above. Tiny red ants built mounded homes in the soft earth and carpenter ants swarmed up the trunks of banyans. The roads were completely covered with the occasional undulating carpet of blue crabs.”
The patriarch’s philosophy on child-rearing was “Get them outside, get them in a garden, give them a magnifying glass,” says the garden’s current director, Dr. Carl Lewis. Fairchild’s garden impacts at least 150,000 students annually, both through in-person visits or via the Fairchild Challenge Program, now in 300 schools. It’s also collaborating with NASA’s seeds-in-space program, “Growing Beyond Earth.” Many who get started as students return as researchers or staffers, Lewis says, quickly ticking five names off the top of his head. “They all got their Ph.Ds. at Florida International University doing part of their training here. And that’s really David Fairchild’s legacy.”
Knowing his life’s work continues to serve the cause of horticulture would gratify Fairchild. The gardens, biographer Stone points out, remain a living archive of things he saw and gathered, as well as a hotbed of botanical research. If the high-level science doesn’t win over visitors, there’s the sensory seduction. The place is a riotous feast, its air spiced with scent, its paths shaded with behemoth specimens: cypress and sausage trees, sprawling mangroves and ancient mangoes. Science walks arm-in-arm with the senses. You
may feel yourself drifting, entranced, deeper and deeper into the psychedelic cerise anemone that is the interior of a tree’s spring-scented flower, reality wobbling and warping around you. Yet there, implanted at its foot, is a serviceable sans-serif ID tag, anchoring it to the known world: Couroupita guianensis, cannonball tree. And above it all, lives the spirit of the garden’s namesake, the patron saint not just of gourmands, but of citizen scientists, this gentle sensualist whose scientific wanderlust and benevolence continue to nourish Florida—and the great green world—to this day.
As for the public gardens that bear his name, the place was born in a wet flash of inspiration in July of 1934. “Dear Marjory,” wrote Montgomery to journalist Douglas. “When I was taking a bath this morning, I had an idea. It would be a lasting disgrace to all of us if we do not provide for a permanent tropical garden bearing David Fairchild’s name.” A veteran of both the Spanish-American and First World Wars, Montgomery was used to getting things done. “Well sir, I think you’ve got it,” Douglas replied. “I think
that the Fairchild Garden is a purely swell idea.”
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Amy Bennett Williams is an environmentally focused writer for the USA Today Network, based at the Fort Myers News-Press. Her pictorial history book, Along the Caloosahatchee River was released by Arcadia publishing in 2011; her second, Fort Myers, City of Palms— A Contemporary Portrait, came out in 2017. She wrote “One Beautiful Blink” in the Spring 2021 issue of FORUM.