Now I separate out heirloom gardening with living history gardening. Both are quite worthy of existence, but have totally different goals and outcomes.
Heirloom gardening is important because it preserves seed of plants that would otherwise be forever lost to the world. However, heirloom seed is also usually considered to be any seed that is open-pollinated. That means, for example, that one could chose anything from The Large Red tomato (ca. before 1841), Livingston's Paragon (1870), or the Abe Lincoln (1923). All of these are heirloom varieties and can be grown in an heirloom garden, and the grower would have an "old timey" garden, and be saving valuable old seed.
One problem with a lot of heirloom seeds is they're saved because they have pretty seeds or an unusual fruit, but they might not be representative of what was a common, typical, everyday variety. That's where the living history garden comes in.
If what a person wants is a garden representative of a specific time and place then they're creating what I call a living history garden. The first thing one would have to do is decide what specific time they want to have their garden represent. It took us several years of study and an extensive amount of research in period newspapers, period agricultural books, local store day-books, and of course period seed catalogs. Once we determined what was the most common vegetable and/or fruit we set about trying to locate it.
For us, that year we chose was 1863, and the place was Gallia County, Ohio (south-eastern section along the Ohio River, Zone 6A of the USDA growing area). Since I started out with tomatoes, I'll stay with that theme. What our research showed us was that there was basically one tomato, the Large Red, that showed up in every source we looked at that talked about varieties of tomatoes. These sources included: Miss Beecher's Domestic Economy, 1841, the Shaker Seed Catalog, 1843, as well as the two Ohio seed catalogs from 55 and 58, and numberous times in US and Ohio Agricultural reports, cookbooks, and Fearing Burr's 1863 and 65 editions of Field and Garden Vegetables of America. Burr actually wrote "From the time of the introduction of the tomato to its general use in this country, the Large Red was almost the only kind cultivated, or even commonly known." The Large Red was what I *had* to have.
My phone conversations with various heirloom seed companies went something like this:
"Yes, I'm looking for the Large Red Tomato, do you carry it?"
Sale's clerk, "Yes ma'am, we have several large red tomatoes. Which one in particular are you looking for?"
"I'm looking for *the* Large Red tomato."
Well, you can see how this could turn into an Abbott and Costello routine, and it did on a few occasions.
Finally, I located the seed at my last resort the US Germ Plasm Center (a repository of old seed saved for breeding purposes). They had, I believe it was, three different batches, and they suggested we take all three, since they weren't sure how true the seeds were, or how viable they were after years of storage. What was fun was comparing the growth habits step by step with those of the Large Red in Burr's book -- and those in a modern book about modern tomatoes. One or two of the batches (hey, this was 11 years ago) did not turn out to be the Large Red -- but at least one proved to be true. We contacted Southern Exposure Seed Exchange with the news and they were elated to have an opportunity to buy the seed from us and reintroduce the Large Red to the modern market. While SESE does continue to carry the seed, we are no longer distributors, so we have vested interest in this article.
It's interesting to note that SESE found that in their "1996 trials it became a favorite of a chef in a Charlottesville, VA restaurant." Fascinating, after 155 years of tomato breeding and literally hundreds of varieties, the chef went back to what many believe to be the tomato Jefferson first grew in his gardens, and introduced to the American people. Though it can be positively identified in an 1841 catalog.
Growing a living history garden can be tons of fun. If anyone has an interest in historic gardening up to 1865 Fearing Burr's book *Field and Garden Vegetables of America* is well worth the $35 that we paid for it from The American Botanist, Booksellers. We asked about the 1863 edition which the publisher said was identical except new cultivars of plants were added, knowing '63 was our year, he went ahead and sent us the 63 index as well. But the book is hard cover and 667 pages long, well worth the price.
In his preface Burr wrote that the book isn't a "treatise on cultivation" which can be found through "standard works of American authors, as well as by means of the numerous agricultural and horticultural peroidicals of our time.." But what he's writing is in "regard to the characteristics which distinguish the numerous varieties; their difference in size, form, color, quality, and season of prefection; their hardiness, productiveness, and comparative value for cultivation, -- these details, a knowledge of which is important as well to the experienced cultivator as to the beginner, have heretofore been obtained only through sources scattered and fragmentary..."
We did the above with beans, beets, cabbage, carrots, celery, corn, cucumbers, lettuce, muskmelons, onions, parsnips, peas, peppers, potatoes, radishes, rhubarb, salsify, squash, tomatoes, turnips and wheat. The results of our research can be found at Results
Linda Trent
copyright: January 22, 2006
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