16-05-2025
- Science
- Wall Street Journal
‘Green Gold' Review: How the Avocado Grew on Us
An odd quirk of the avocado, Persea americana to botanists, is the clockwork performed by its blossoms. They undergo a complicated sequence of opening, closing and reopening that keeps each flower's male and female sex organs from operating on the same day. Among two large categories of cultivated strains, group A trees bear flowers that are functionally female in the morning and male the next afternoon. Meanwhile, group B's flowers are female in the afternoon and male the next morning.
Unreliable pollination had long baffled commercial avocado growers until, on May 5, 1923, the botanist A.B. Stout had the game-changing idea of setting up cameras in a California orchard. His photographs solved the mystery by capturing the discrepancy between A and B's blossoming schedules, thus suggesting the wisdom of planting trees from both groups in close proximity.
The lesson doesn't seem to have great priority in today's industrial-scale avocado production, at least as depicted by Sarah Allaback and Monique F. Parsons in 'Green Gold,' a trenchant chronicle of the fruit's commercial and cultural exploitation from the late 19th century to the present. The authors' enlightening picture draws on a wide range of material—plant pathology studies, avocado-association yearbooks, Super Bowl commercials, leading figures' field notes and more.
The book broadly centers on two 'mother trees' while saluting 'the people who nurtured them, for money and love.' In 1911 Carl Schmidt, an American investigator scouting for avocado specimens in Mexico, observed a tree bearing splendid crops near Atlixco in Puebla state. He was sufficiently impressed to take cuttings from the tree and bring them back for grafting in an Altadena, Calif., nursery, where the strain received the varietal name El Fuerte (Spanish for 'the Strong One').
