Origin of Cultivated Plants The International Scientific Series Volume XLVIII — Edition Insights

The Problem of Wild Status

De Candolle repeatedly confronts a core difficulty: distinguishing a plant that is truly wild from one that has escaped from cultivation. In the case of the star apple (Chrysophyllum Caïnito), he notes that Sloane considered it an escape in Jamaica, while Jacquin says vaguely “Inhabits Martinique and San Domingo,” and Grisebach lists it as both wild and cultivated across several islands. De Candolle does not resolve the question definitively; instead, he presents the conflicting evidence and lets the reader see the uncertainty. This pattern recurs with the marmalade plum (Lucuma mammosa), where Humboldt and Bonpland found it wild on the Orinoco, but in Brazil it is only a garden species. The author’s honesty about incomplete data—such as the lack of satisfactory illustrations because colonists assume the plant is too well known—gives the work a scientific humility rare in popular natural history of the period.

Linguistic and Archaeological Clues

De Candolle frequently turns to language and material remains as evidence. For the olive in the Canary Islands, he argues that if the Guanchos had possessed the tree, their language would likely retain names for olive oil, yet Webb and Berthelot record none. He also points to the absence of olive leaves in European tufa deposits where laurel and myrtle are found, treating this as an indication of later naturalization. These methods show his willingness to combine botany with philology and paleontology. The preface explicitly states that the work relies on “testimonial proof” sifted like historical evidence—a rare admission for a science based on observation. This interdisciplinary approach allows him to correct errors dating from the Greeks and Romans, though he acknowledges that some questions remain open to conjecture.

Geographic Movement and Human Agency

The book traces not only where plants originated but how they spread. De Candolle notes that the sapodilla, though esteemed in the tropics, has not been widely transported to Africa or Asia, possibly because of its insipid taste. The Peruvian caïmito (Lucuma Caïnito) was carried from Peru to Ega on the Amazon and to Pará, where it is called abi or abiu. These details reveal a geography shaped by human preference and accident. The olive, despite its ancient cultivation in the Mediterranean, has spread slowly to the Cape, America, and Australia; de Candolle attributes this to its slow growth, need for grafting, and competition from other oil plants. He even suggests that productivity in the Old World could be doubled by grafting onto wild trees, as the French did in Algeria—a practical note that ties botanical history to contemporary agriculture.

The Weight of Authority and Error

A persistent theme is the correction of inherited mistakes. De Candolle states that Linnaeus’s indications are “incomplete or incorrect” for three out of four cultivated plants, and that these errors are still repeated in periodicals and popular works. He aims to correct mistakes “which date in some cases from the Greeks and Romans.” The excerpts show him engaging with earlier authorities—Sloane, Jacquin, Grisebach, Webb and Berthelot—not to dismiss them but to weigh their reliability. For the marmalade plum, he notes that no satisfactory illustration exists because colonists neglect to send selected specimens, a “neglect … common enough in the case of cultivated plants.” This meta-commentary on the practice of botany itself gives the book an unusual self-awareness: de Candolle is as interested in how knowledge is produced and transmitted as in the plants themselves.

Readers approaching this work should expect a methodical, evidence-driven inquiry rather than a narrative of discovery. De Candolle’s prose is dense with citations and cautious conclusions; he often presents multiple hypotheses without forcing a single answer. The book rewards attention to the small debates—over a missing fossil leaf, a contested wild population, or a gap in indigenous vocabulary—that reveal how botanical knowledge is built from imperfect clues. For those interested in the history of science, it offers a clear example of late-nineteenth-century biogeography in practice, before genetics transformed the field.

That rainy afternoon, I kept pausing over de Candolle’s careful doubts about where sorghum first grew, his gentle untangling of old testimonies. Later, drifting sideways, I found myself holding another volume, one that traces the same grasses through Sudan’s own shifting borders and memories. They don’t contradict each other, exactly—Flora of the Sudan — Text and Context simply lets the plants speak for themselves, with less certainty and more weather.