Strawberry | Elisa Sevilla and Ana Sevilla | New World Objects of Knowledge

STRAWBERRY

Elisa Sevilla and Ana Sevilla

Figure 1. V. Albán, Native Nobleman of Quito in Festive Attire, 1783 (courtesy of Museo de América, Madrid).

Although the very English custom of consuming massive amounts of strawberries and cream at fashionable Wimbledon might lead one to think otherwise, modern cultivated strawberries are not English, nor even European. The cultivated strawberry is the product of the labours of ancient Patagonian horticulturists and modern global networks of experimentation and knowledge production that linked Europe with the Americas. The juicy, plump modern fruit is a hybrid produced by crossing the wild ‘scarlet’ strawberry of eastern North America (Fragaria virginiana) with varieties of the cultivated Chilean strawberry of the Andes (Fragaria chiloensis). The first such hybrid was produced in France in the 18th century. The French spy Amédée-Francois de Frézier visited Chile in 1714 and smuggled the frutilla grown in Concepción, introducing it into France, whence it travelled north to England. But Frézier only brought female plants, which of course did not bear fruit until they were planted next to the male Virginian species in Brest, producing the first hybrids. In 1766, royal gardener Antoine Nicolas Duchesne demonstrated that the strawberry plants were female, male or hermaphrodite. A century later, several new varieties were produced in Britain, only a few years before the first Wimbledon tennis tournament. Thomas A. Knight, president of the Horticultural Society of London, was the first to perform large-scale hybridisation experiments. Michael Keens developed a systematic method for cultivation. Isaac Anderson-Henry established important correspondence with gardeners and botanists who sent seeds from around the world, especially from Quito, to experiment on breeding programs. Joseph Myatt developed some of the more famous varieties in Britain, including ‘Myatt’s Pine’, ‘Eliza’, ‘British Queen’ and ‘Deptford Pine’.

The cultivation and hybridisation of strawberries produced an ongoing debate inside the British scientific and horticultural communities. The core of the discussion was anchored in the fact that European strawberries (Fragaria vesca) could not produce hybrids with the American species. This blind alley intrigued several horticulturalists and scientists, including Charles Darwin. Darwin used the example of the strawberry in The Origin of Species as an illustration of how fast humans will domesticate a crop if they value it, and to show that variability within a species is the material source of commercial variety production, arguing that ‘as soon, however, as gardeners picked out individual plants with slightly larger, earlier, or better fruit, and raised seedlings from them, and again picked out the best seedlings and bred from them, then, there appeared (aided by some crossing with distinct species) those many admirable varieties of the strawberry which have been raised during the last thirty or forty years.’ It was clear that the strawberry could shed some light on the mechanisms for creating species variability. Curiously, Darwin failed to acknowledge the foundational work of Andean peoples in this artificial selection process. But as the horticulturist T.A. Knight pointed out, abundant evidence supported the idea that the American forms spontaneously crossed over. Indeed, the reason for the explosion of varieties appeared to reside precisely in the promiscuity of the American strawberries. Knight concluded that the best existing varieties were an eventual product of such crosses. Later, the strawberry would be further hybridised and modernised in the United States in the 20th century by incorporating strains of the plump and durable ‘Huachi’ strawberry from Ambato, Ecuador, thus producing a highly mobile and attractive fruit.

The history of the modern strawberry’s mobility is long and colourful. In 1783, the Quito painter Vicente Albán produced a striking series of six oil canvases portraying costumed locals in their natural environs consuming or peddling the region’s fruits in what is today Ecuador. The fruits depicted included guava, several varieties of passion fruit, an Andean cherry called capuli, papaya, coconut, avocado, chirimoya, chilguacanes, chamburos, mameys, pitahayas, obos and a variety of plantains. But the most pervasive fruit in the series is the Andean strawberry or frutilla.

Vicente Albán’s work provides a window not only into the bounty of Andean culture and nature but more precisely into the workings and aesthetics of the prolific Hispanic American Enlightenment, which in the late 18th century produced hundreds of such paintings and thousands of botanical, zoological and ethnological illustrations. These paintings were apparently commissioned by José Celestino Mutis, an Andalusian polymath from Cadiz based in what is today Colombia and at the time was the Viceroyalty of New Granada, which included Quito. In 1783, the paintings were sent to Spain, where they became part of the Royal Cabinet of Natural History (see ‘Creole Cabinet’ in this volume), and later the collections of the National Museum of Natural History, and still later the National Archaeological Museum, until finally arriving at their present resting place in Madrid’s Museum of America.

The first painting in the series is entitled Yapanga de Quito, which may be translated as Mestiza or Chola of Quito (Figure 2). Like the others in the series, this painting is oil on canvas, measuring 109 × 80 cm. Here, Albán represents a yapanga surrounded by trees and fruits, with a numbered reference and brief description of each. In the lower left-hand corner, Alban paints a strawberry plant with a caption that reads: ‘Arvolito que produce las Frutillas y son una especie de Fresas como las de España, pero mucho más gruesas y dulces’ (‘Shrub that produces the Frutilla strawberry which is like the Fresa strawberries of Spain, only fatter and sweeter’). The strawberry plant is painted with detail, including the fruits, flowers and runners with their sterile and productive knots – a skilled demonstration of local botanical knowledge.

Figure 2. V. Albán, Mestiza of Quito, 1783 (courtesy of Museo de América, Madrid).

In Indio principal de Quito en trage de Gala (Figure 1), which may be translated as Native Nobleman of Quito in Festive Attire, an explicit aesthetic connection is made between the colourful attire of the local inhabitants and the colour and bounty of the fruits of the land. This aspect struck many European visitors to the New World during the period, including such figures as Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, distinguished members of the Franco-Hispanic geodesic expedition led by La Condamine, organised by the Parisian Academy of Sciences and sponsored by the enlightened Charles III, king of Spain and the Indies. Ulloa – who, like Mutis, hailed from Cadiz – described American fruits as ‘monstrous’ gifts of nature that graced the opulent tables of Quito’s notables, be they Creole, mestizo or native. In this painting, the native nobleman of Quito holds a plate brimming with huge, luscious strawberries in one hand while he tastes one with his other hand. The white inside of the Ambato strawberry is clearly visible.

Although the ‘scarlet’ and Chilean strawberries grow wild in North and South America, only in the southernmost reaches of the Andes did the Picunche, Huilliche and Mapuche peoples cultivate the berry. In their language, the Mapuche differentiated the wild from the cultivated, naming the former llahuén and the latter kellén. According to the chronicle of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, the Chilean strawberry or frutilla de Chile was brought to Peru as early as 1557 and to Quito sometime before 1573. This species was much bigger and sweeter than other strawberries, and it was also whiter and more durable and thus resistant to bruising. The native, sedentary peoples of central Chile cultivated this species of strawberry and consumed it fresh, dried or in a highly valued fermented drink called lahueñe mushca. The roots of the strawberry were also used as an abortive drug. During the early modern or colonial period, the Chilean strawberry was transplanted throughout South America, becoming a common orchard crop. The Chilean strawberries grew particularly well in the highlands of the equatorial Andes. They came to be known as the ‘strawberries of Ambato’. In Ambato, the frutillas grew two or three times larger than elsewhere. Local lore claims that the strawberries were originally transplanted from Chile by José Antonio Blanco Antorvoz de Salinas. The process of adaptation must have involved an active selection by the peasants of the region, since the plants had to adapt to the very short photoperiods and constant low growing temperatures of the Ecuadorian highlands. By the 1920s, and unlike the wild and Chilean varieties, the Ambato plants had perfect hermaphrodite flowers, another indicator of the artificial selection process performed by Andean farmers.

Figure 3. V. Albán, Native Woman in Festive Attire, 1783 (courtesy of the Museo de America, Madrid).

In India en trage de Gala (Figure 3), which may be translated as Native Woman in Festive Attire, Albán exhibits the strawberries in a fruit basket. Here, a tropical bird feeding on the fruit reveals the white flesh inside. Again, the skill and knowledge of the painter is manifestly evident. It was this kind of skill and knowledge that produced the modern cultivated strawberry that could eventually be enjoyed courtside at Wimbledon.

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