The Fruit Hunters Read online

  I ask if anyone can taste these fruits domestically. He makes an offhand remark about smuggling them in. Smuggling? Yes, he says, certain enthusiasts are known to occasionally smuggle home rare cultivars. When I press him for details, his goofy Gilligan grin fades, and he says, curtly, “I don’t think that would be an appropriate conversation to have.”

  Although most of Miami’s fruit hunters follow importing protocols, some skirt regulations. For that reason, government officials at the United States Department of Agriculture have started conducting armed raids on rare fruit growers, bursting into their backyards with attack dogs. Richard Wilson tells me that he has pressed charges against the USDA for a violation of civil rights when a squadron of machine-gun wielding agriculture agents raided his nursery and accused him of smuggling in seeds. “They came in here like the goddamn Gestapo,” he says angrily. “It was like they were gonna save us from terrorism. Six agents burst in and started rifling through everything trying to find illegal seeds. They orchestrated it like it was a big drug raid. It scared the shit outta my wife, not to mention my customers. They photographed stuff, and confiscated seeds. They thought I had smuggled ‘noxious weeds’ in from Asia. They were after an illegal seed that was one-sixteenth of an inch long. My palm seeds were an inch long. They didn’t know a noxious weed from a palm tree seed. They wouldn’t know a noxious weed if it grew in their butt. I got a five-million-dollar business here; you think I’m gonna grow an illegal plant and screw it up? They took three of my palms—palms not known in cultivation—and they killed them. They all died. I talked to the head authority in the U.S. on CITES [the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna] and he didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. I was falsely accused. I never even fathomed anything like this illegal plant-and-seed smuggling interdiction service existed.”

  It’s becoming clear that some of these fruit lovers can be pretty intense about the objects of their desire. The Fairchild garden’s director Mike Maunder, who seemed a bit freaked out by the crowd, describes the fixation with tropical fruit as a prime example of horticultural fanaticism. “The fruit people are driven by that real sense of exploration,” he explains. “They are going into the Amazon, going into New Guinea, and looking for unusual fruit.” Maunder points at a couple of gentlemen sitting on the grass and suggests that Ossenfort and I chat with them about how they “love fruits, live fruits and collect fruits from all over the world.”

  One of them, a bearded fellow in a leisure suit and a green Rare Fruit Council baseball cap, introduces himself as Har Mahdeem. He is a specialist in Annonas, a genus of trees and shrubs that produces large custard-filled fruits like atemoyas, guanábanas, cherimoyas, llamas and bullock’s hearts. “For rare fruiters, finding a new fruit is a great adventure,” he says, with a wide smile. He’s been on several collecting trips to Guatemala and Central America, looking for orange, pink and red Annona fruits to bring back for his employer, Zill High Performance Plants in Boynton Beach, Florida.

  Mahdeem was born in Michigan but grew up in the Amazon basin near the city of Manaus, where his missionary parents started an agricultural school. “I soon acquired a nickname: Bouritirana, which is the name of a small, worthless fruit,” he says in a singsong voice with a indeterminate, vaguely Southern twang. He was given the name because he’d asked someone if he could eat it. “That was my perpetual question as we walked through the forest: ‘Can this be eaten? Can this be eaten?’”

  In recent years, he legally changed his name to Har Mahdeem, which means “Hills of Mars” or “Martian Mountains” in Hebrew. I ask him why he likes fruits. “They’re eye-catching, nose catching, taste-bud catching,” he says, laughing. “There are thousands of plant species that produce edible fruits. No one has ever tasted even a fifth of them.”

  Sitting beside Mahdeem is an elfin man in his sixties named Crafton Clift. Scrunching his face in deep concentration, he says he has no idea why he loves fruits so much. Perhaps it has something to do with wanting to be a child again. He also has a nickname: Graftin’ Crafton. They call him that, pipes in his teenaged nephew Scott, sitting nearby, because “he grafts way too much.”

  Grafting is a means of propagating a plant by cutting a branch from one tree and sticking it onto the trunk of another tree. For the most part, this technique is used to clone a desired variety in order to create more of the same fruits on other trees. Clift’s passion—or compulsion—is grafting together as many different species as possible and seeing what comes out. “I like making fruits—creating them,” says Clift. “It’s like the excitement of breeding a Great Dane for the first time.”

  A graft from a certain species can take hold only on a related species. Apple branches can’t be grafted onto orange trees. But you can graft different citrus varieties together so that the same tree bears lemons, limes, grapefruit, tangerines, kumquats and citranges. A Chilean farmer recently made international headlines with his “Tree of Life,” covered in grafts of plums, peaches, cherries, apricots, almonds and nectarines.

  Sometimes, a graft mutates into a different fruit. This is what’s known as a sport. Perhaps one in every million or two grafts will spontaneously mutate and develop different characteristics than its progenitor. If the bud mutation is interesting, yielding a different colors, or flavor, the sport can then be propagated itself. Exposing branches to mild doses of radiation is also done in order to expedite mutations.

  When humans first started grafting around 6000 B.C., it was seen as a form of magic. “Up to the end of the middle ages, grafting was considered a secret by the initiated and a miracle by the public,” wrote Frederic Janson. Some believed that, for a graft to hold, it was necessary for a man and woman to make love in the moonlight. At the moment of climax, the woman was to secure the graft between the tree and its new limb. The royal fruits of the Tang dynasty were only grafted by the wizardlike hunchbacked gardener of Ch’Ang-An. English philosopher John Case ludicrously claimed that grafting a pear tree onto a cabbage was “a wonderful fact of art.”

  In the early days of American life, shady types took advantage of the public ignorance of grafting. There were mountebank grafters who stuck branches onto trees with wax—by the time you realized you’d been had, months had passed and the vagabond gardener was long gone.

  Poets argued about the ethics of grafting. “He grafts upon the wild the tame; / That th’ uncertain and adulterate fruit / Might put the palate in dispute,” wrote Marvell. “And in the cherry he does nature vex, / To procreate without a sex.” Abraham Cowley saw in grafting a hint of Godlike power: “Who would not joy to see his conqu’ring Hand / O’er all the Vegetable World command?” Religious leaders frowned upon grafting as tampering with divinity. It was, according to the Talmud, an abomination.

  Shakespeare, in his comedy The Winter’s Tale, argued that grafting is indeed natural: “Yet Nature is made better by no mean / But Nature makes that mean. So, over that art / Which you say adds to Nature, is an art / That Nature makes … This is an art / Which does mend Nature—change it rather, but / The art itself is nature.” (One wonders whether he’d apply this same argument to transgenic modification or cloned meat.)

  The distrust eventually subsided. Grafting became a passion for historical figures like St. Jerome, the Ostrogoths’ King Theodoric the Great and George Washington. As with any other aspect of fruit growing, it attracted intense devotees. Feng-Li, a Chinese diplomat in the fifth century B.C., abandoned his career when he became consumed by grafting. The North American Fruit Explorers handbook even warns that grafting can become “a bit overwhelming … an intense activity bordering on obsession.”

  Clift doesn’t seem to have heeded the handbook’s warning. “As long as he can graft, he’s happy,” says Richard Campbell. Because Clift has been caught in the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden climbing trees and grafting different species together, security now forces him to leave his knives and grafting implements at the door. “He has to propagate
,” explains Campbell. “I know how it is: you find something wonderful and you want to graft it. But I do it in my yard—not in the botanical collections of the United States of America. If someone showed him a strange fruit, he would just drop everything and follow it and lose his job.”

  Indeed, Clift seems to float in and out of projects. Periodic dispatches in newsletters mention his “retirement” from one garden or how a “dream job of looking for new fruits” didn’t pan out because of management conflicts. “People like Crafton aren’t accepted by the establishment because they’re different—they’re odd,” says Campbell, explaining that Clift had been banished from the Peace Corps. At one point, he says, incredulously, Clift was offered a job working with fruits in Costa Rica. He decided to drive down from Florida. In Guatemala, his suitcases were stolen. In El Salvador, he was sleeping by the road when someone robbed the clothes off his back. He continued to drive in the nude. Abandoning the car in Nicaragua, he proceeded to walk the rest of the way to Costa Rica, living on jungle fruits and trekking naked through forests for weeks.

  “He walks through the world in a complete naive wonderland of fruit,” says Campbell, recounting how, at another point, Clift had been hired by a wealthy Thai family to create the world’s biggest tropical fruit garden. He was forbidden from sending seeds to other fruit enthusiasts, but was caught in the act. His hands were to be chopped off as punishment. Luckily, he managed to escape, fleeing Thailand.

  On the lawn of the Fairchild Botanic Garden, Clift says that his main problem with the Nong Nooch gig was more existential. “I was asked to collect all the tropical fruits of the world,” Clift explains. “The director said, ‘How come no one ever thought of this?’ I didn’t even answer him. I thought: ‘You have no idea how many tropical fruits there are in the world. And even if you collected them all, you still would only be at the starting place, because then you start selecting to find the best ones, and grafting and hybridizing.’”

  Clift becomes visibly overwhelmed when speaking about the limit-lessness of fruits in nature. “It’s like you open a room and you see all the tropical fruits there and you think ‘That’s it?’ No. Whether it’s the jungles of Borneo or the Amazon, every door that you open opens into a larger room. And this is before we start hybridizing and recombining the genes or even selecting to get the biggest, the juiciest. It’s day one with tropical fruits. A tremendous variety are just now being named and discovered. As long as we have any forests left at all, we will find new fruits. Give us a few centuries to cultivate these things and they’re going to be very different. In my lifetime things have changed so much.”

  I SPEND THE rest of the morning asking guests at the pavilion’s opening about where to find their favorite fruits. Their answers are as limitless as Clift’s jungle rooms. The best white strawberries are Purén, Chile’s frutillas blancas, although other sweet specimens grow near Istanbul and Royan. The finest dates in the world grow in the khlas groves of al-Mutairfi in Saudi Arabia. The white loquat is only available in the last weeks of May in Suzhou, China. The cannibal tomato is used in Polynesian headhunter sauce. The butter fruit is a creamy fruit best enjoyed in the Philippines, as is the yellow, lycheelike alupag and the kalmon. According to Florence Strange, when opened, the kalmon “reveals a beautifully spiraled gelatinous center with tentacles radiating out from the top.” The honied mohobo-hobo is mixed into an orange porridge called mutundavaira in Southeastern Africa. The Milky Way yamabôshi is an oblate scarlet fruit noted for its papaya flavor in Japan. The Pandanus edulis is a red, brown and yellow fruit from Madagascar that resembles a cluster of wide-bottomed bananas growing fused together like a pineapple. The best pomegranates are found in the Iranian towns of Kashan, Saveh and Yazd. In Lebanon, unripe plums, grapes, apples, lemons and green almonds are eaten with salt as snacks. “It’s like your senses are being invaded,” is how one of them longingly describes it.

  Richard Campbell says that his favorite fruit is any of the world’s fruits at their peak in their right environment. “When you sit in an ancient lychee orchard on Hainan Island, China, with an old man with the wrinkles of life in his face and he hands you a lychee that his family has grown for a thousand years and you eat that fruit—that’s your favorite fruit.”

  Hundreds and thousands of cultivars spiral off from the tens of thousands of umbrella species that bear edible fruits. As Graftin’ Crafton points out, nobody knows precisely how many fruits exist, because new ones are still being discovered and others go extinct before ever being documented. Still others materialize through artificial or natural selection.

  Fruits grow in every climate and in every region. Different elevations, microclimates, and land conditions all contribute bursts of diversity. The skin-searing heat in desert areas produce fruits, as do the murky marinations of bogs, swamps and marshlands. Cloud forests, where plants are continually enshrouded in fogs and clouds, abound with species that can’t grow anywhere else. The wildest diversity of fruit life is to be found in the resplendent cummerbund on the tuxedo of planet Earth in between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Temperate habitats, which house hundreds of species, cannot compare to the richness of tropical rain forests, where tens of thousands of species coexist.

  A visitor to the Sub-Saharan region will encounter numerous fruits, such as the plumlike caura, a number of berries including the sône and the tekeli, and the hazelnut-sized cobaï fruit, said to be so delicious that, when in season, no other food is touched.

  Of the over 750 species of fig, some grow in desert regions and others ripen underground. The Violette de Bordeaux fig is filled with a molten flesh that tastes like raspberry jam. The Panachée or tiger-striped fig is yellow with green stripes. Its red interior has a flavor likened to strawberry milk shakes. Fig expert Richard E. Watts has written in Fruit Gardener how “a few private collectors now have most of the rare figs in Southern California.” One of them, Jon Verdick of www.figs4fun.com, grows more than three hundred different types. Where can people taste quality figs? “The simple answer is to buy them from me (grin),” writes Verdick. Or grow your own. Figs once grew in the hanging gardens of Babylon. Before the tenth century, the best fig was the Sbai, which still grows in Israel. According to certain apocryphal scriptures, figs in Eden used to be the size of watermelons.

  From Manchuria to Manitoba, prairie habitats also play host to numerous fruits. Blueberries were first domesticated in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, where they now grow in massive quantities. Even severe arctic climates produce fruits. Doyenne du Comice pears, with their distinctive Chanel No. 5 fragrance, do well in gardens north of Toronto, Canada. Orchards of apples, plums and peaches thrive in Kazan, Russia, despite spending months buried under snow. Certain species of kiwi grow in Siberia.

  Alaska is the one state that doesn’t ship produce to the Hunt’s Point Terminal Market in New York. When I inquired why they don’t carry Alaskan fruit, the market’s executive director gave the sort of exaggerated pause normally directed at imbeciles or little children. “Because nothing grows there,” she snapped, frostily.

  In fact, Alaska is home to numerous vegetables, not to mention apples, blueberries, raspberries and other fruits. After I listed cloudberries, nagoonberries, salmonberries, mouse nuts, beach asparagus, wild cucumber, kelp, dulse, rhubarb, spiked saxifrage, silverberries and ser-viceberries—which are mixed with sea purslane and reindeer fat to make Eskimo ice cream—the Hunt’s Point executive director gave another pause, and then said haughtily that she hadn’t heard of any of them.

  Thousands of tantalizing fruits that never make it to North America or Europe are eaten everyday across the globe. Even if we knew they existed, importing fruits over borders is a process fraught with botanical, economic and geopolitical challenges. Complicating matters, most little-known fruits don’t produce abundant enough crops to merit shipping. They’re also only in season for a brief period. And with many fruits not cultivated on a mass scale, quality varies widely from tree to tree. All of which
is exciting to fruit hunters, but anathema to supermarket supply chains.

  Fruits have trouble traveling between different temperature zones. Just as temperate berries deteriorate when shipped to the tropics, tropical fruits taste less flavorful in colder regions. Fruits are highly perishable, and weeks of transport only aggravate matters. Commercial fruits aren’t picked ripe; they’re picked whenever boats are scheduled to depart. These unripe fruits often turn mushy and even start to ferment in transit.

  For all these reasons, the research undertaken at the Whitman pavilion could prove instrumental in ushering in a new world of northern fruits. As the greenhouse’s fledgling trees grow tall over the coming decades, the fruits produced will be studied in order to be grown and sold on a wider scale.

  “Come along, Eric,” says Angela, confusing me with her stepson. She leads me to the Jean duPont Shehan Visitor Center, explaining how members of the duPont family—the famous chemical manufacturers—are in attendance. At the postinauguration lunch reception, baskets of red Hawaiian rambutans are passed around the banquet hall. They’ve been allowed into the mainland because of a new irradiation technology. The buzz around the room is that X-rayed fruits will soon be allowed into America not only from Hawaii, but from Southeast Asia, South America and other tropical destinations. (The first shipments of legally imported, irradiated, Southeast Asian mangosteens were finally allowed in three years later, in 2007). There’s a consensus that irradiated fruits are never of the highest quality. To truly know these fruits will still require traveling to their places of origin, as the fruit hunters have always known.