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On Strawberries
By Melanie Devore
Flannery O’Connor reported the most foulest of fowl crimes committed on the grounds of Milledgeville’s most famous “bird sanctuary” in a letter to Mrs. Rumsey Haynes on April 29, 1956. It seems that while their literary caretaker was sipping tea at Michigan State University, Andalusia’s troop of pea chickens invaded Regina O’Connor’s strawberry patch and swiped all the sweet berries for themselves. Eventually a peace treaty between the birds and the farm’s matriarch was engineered. But I hope it took a good long time before a truce was reached. Strawberries are not just any fruit. The plants sprawling within Regina O’Connor’s strawberry patch have a history rooted in the deepest South and had a coming-out party arranged by an engineer with a flare for fireworks, espionage, and botany.
It took the French son of a lawyer, Amédée Frézier, to bring the strawberry of Chile to Europe. Unlike Dad, Frézier abhorred the legal profession. As a lieutenant in the infantry, Frézier transformed military pyrotechnics into aerial artistry and wrote the first definitive guide for building decorative firework displays. For his award, Frézier was promoted to the military intelligence corps, and, subsequently, was poised to provide passage of the Chilean strawberry to Europe.
In 1712, Frézier boarded an armed merchant ship and set sail to Concepción, Chile. Louis XIV insisted that Frézier infiltrate the Spanish colonial administration. Frézier excelled in espionage, providing every detail needed by the French to invade their adversary while making “friends” with Spanish officials. His natural history narratives included the account of “red” gold, known to the Spanish as “frutilla” and to us as strawberries.
Strawberries thrived in the rich soils surrounding Concepción and covered
fields with their walnut-sized fruits. European botanists and gardeners
salivated at the value of such robust fruits. Fortunately, Frézier
stashed living strawberry plants in his vessel for the six-month journey
back to France. Five of those plants survived, and two were presented to
the chap who watered them during the journey between Chile and France. Of
the remaining plants, one went to the Minister of Fortifications, a second
went to the famed botanist Antoine Jussieu for placement in the King's
Garden, and the third Frézier kept for himself.
Importing
strawberry plants successfully is one thing. Getting your New World
recruits pollinated and thriving back in the Old World is another. Either
Frézier’s plant, or the one he gave the Minister of Fortifications, was the
mother of the strawberry empire of Brest, France. The hottest horticultural
gurus failed at crossing and cultivating the Chilean berry in France, then
in Holland and England. Finally, back in France, Brest’s coastal climate
provided the perfect conditions and just the right crossing partner to
produce the stock of the commercial strawberries we enjoy today.
Growers in
Brest noticed that the Chilean plants exploded with fruit when they were
planted next to rows of the Virginia strawberry. By the late 1750s, fruits
nearly three inches in circumference were harvested near Brest. The
offspring of this successful cross became the foundation of our strawberry
industry in the United States.
Regina O’Connor’s beloved berries had a pedigree as complex, maybe more complex, than the dairy cattle she carefully evaluated and bought for Andalusia Farm. Based on USDA sources, the Blakemore was the most common variety of strawberry cultivated in the South between 1940 and 1960. However, we will never be certain exactly which variety the elder O’Connor cultivated. We do know, however, that Flannery O’Connor’s pea chickens consumed in minutes what took years of careful breeding to achieve
-- the modern strawberry.
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