The Pirate, the Mailman and the Avocado: The Accidental History of Avocados in California
The need for believable histories explains why present circumstances are commonly said to arrive by an unbroken chain of causes spiced with one or two critical junctures where "things would have turned out differently." Progress toward a known goal with occasional drama along the way makes a satisfying historical narrative.
But some histories are crowded with contingencies — one improbable thing after another — when chance takes charge of the storyline. Consider the avocado.
Its history has a big "what if" right at the beginning. Ecologists Dan Janzen and Paul Martin concluded in their 1982 paper, "Neotropical Anachronisms: The Fruits the Gomphotheres Ate," that Central American forests co-evolved with animals that have been gone for tens of thousands of years. Those forests included the ancestors of avocados — even then a fruit with a big seed. Big herbivores ate them and spread the mildly toxic seeds in their dung.
That makes the avocado, according to science writer Connie Barlow, a "ghost of evolution." When its partners in the evolutionary dance — huge, elephant-like gomphotheres and later, giant ground sloths — went extinct, the avocado should have exited with them. But avocados hung on somehow until humans brought avocados out of the forest and into their diet.
What if the avocado had followed its megafauna partners into extinction? What if early intervention in spreading avocado cultivation had been less successful?
The Pirate Botanist
From the highlands of central Mexico, avocados were carried to Guatemala and Venezuela, where Spanish conquistadores found them in village markets in the 1500s. Colonial officials reported that "the part which is eaten … is a paste very similar to butter and very good eating and of good taste, and such that those who have these fruits guard them and esteem them highly."
The Spanish, unfamiliar with forest agriculture, presumed that avocado trees grew wild. In fact, Indigenous cultivators, living in different climatic zones, had been propagating new avocado varieties for hundreds of years. Where the Spanish saw a jungle, Indigenous farmers saw a garden.
William Dampier — pirate, gourmand, ethnographer and botanist — saw novelties he couldn't resist. Dampier was one of the English buccaneers fighting a quasi war with Spain in the last years of the 17th century. He reveled in the things he came across in his three circumnavigations of the world: roast flamingo, Australian flora, Spanish gold, a tattooed native of Sulawesi and the avocados of Jamaica.
In 1697, he shared his taste for avocados with the English public in a popular account of his adventures called "A New Voyage Round the World." He called avocados "avogato pears" and described making a kind of guacamole. He thought it had an unusual after affect.
It is reported that this fruit provokes to lust, and therefore is said to be much esteemed by the Spaniards; and I do believe they are much esteemed by them, for I have met with plenty of [avocados] in many places … where the Spaniards are settled, as in the Bay of Campeche, on the Coast of Cartagena, and the Coast of Caracas; and there are some in Jamaica, which were planted by the Spaniards when they possessed that island.
Despite Dampier's recommendation, avocados remained a European hothouse curiosity. It wasn't until last third of the 19th century that plant collectors saw commercial possibilities in what they called either "ahuacates" (in California) or "alligator pears" (in Florida). Nurserymen propagated trees from Mexico, Guatemala and Jamaica, but experts doubted that Americans would develop a taste for their oily fruit.
The Plant Collector
In 1911, Frederick Popenoe, an Altadena nurseryman, sent Carl Schmidt to Atlixco in Mexico's Puebla State to locate better varieties. Anglo plant collectors still thought that native avocados were essentially a wild crop from trees casually planted in gardens or pastures where they were left untended. Schmidt went from market stall to market stall in Atlixco looking for the best fruit, quizzing sellers where it had come from and tracking the fruit back to a mother tree. He found one growing on the patio of Alejandro LeBlanc.
Schmidt took several cuttings from LeBlanc's tree to graft to rootstock in the Altadena nursery. From those trees, more cuttings were taken for grafting, each graft bearing the fruit of the original LeBlanc tree. The record is unclear if Schmidt or Popenoe compensated LeBlanc for their appropriation of the genetic material of his tree.
A hard freeze in 1913 killed nearly all the young avocado trees in Popenoe's nursery. One that survived had been grafted with buds from the LeBlanc tree. It bore exceptional fruit. Popenoe named the new variety Fuerte in recognition of the tree's stamina.
From the "what if" of its accidental discovery to the "what if" of its survival, the Fuerte variety created a commercial avocado industry in California by 1920. But as successful as it was, the Fuerte wasn't the perfect avocado. It was available only a few months in summer. In some years, the trees didn't yield at all. Industrial agriculture needed a consistent crop, ideally available year-round.
American growers and Department of Agriculture plant scientists, looking for a better avocado, continued to sift through the genetic heritage of Indigenous cultivators in the Mexican highlands, Guatemalan forests and Caribbean islands.
The Mailman
Rudolph Hass (rhymes with Pass) didn't have to go that far. In 1926, he was a 25-cent-an-hour postal worker with a young family. On a hunch that he could make the avocado business pay, he pooled his savings with a loan from his sister to buy one-and-a-half acres of trees in La Habra Heights.
The grove was planted with a mix of Fuerte avocados and other varieties. Hass wanted more Fuertes, but he couldn't afford nursery-grown trees. He considered grafting Fuerte cuttings to his other trees, but he was advised that grafting to new plants would be more successful.
The avocado story branches at this point with several "what ifs." In one version, a plant experimenter named A. R. Rideout, who collected avocado seeds from backyards and trash dumps, sold (or gave) Hass one (or three) of his finds. In another version, Hass bought seedling avocado trees from Rideout and planted them for grafting. In still more versions, Rideout told Hass to plant his three avocado seeds together and allow all three to germinate. He should keep only the hardiest of the three. Or several sets of three randomly chosen seeds (source unspecified) were planted, and Hass hired a professional grafter to transfer Fuerte cuttings to the best of those that grew.
In every version of this story, one seedling tree was a hold out. Three times it rejected Fuerte cuttings. When that tree matured, untended in a corner of the grove, its fruit had unappetizing, purplish black skin covered with prominent bumps. In the version of the story remembered by his children, Hass wanted to cut down the tree but he kept it because the children liked the taste of its fruit.
The Hass Avocado
In time, Hass came to value the anonymous tree's other properties. It stood up to Southern California's cooler temperatures and produced more fruit over a longer harvest season. Despite the fruit's outward appearance, its flesh was creamier than existing commercial varieties. The fruit handled well. Even the thick, bumpy, nearly black rind was a benefit. It would hide defects caused by harvesting and shipping.
Hass patented his avocado in 1935, gave the new variety his name, and went into business with a commercial nursery to graft buds from the Hass tree to commercial nursery rootstock. With industry and government support, clever marketing and the superior qualities of the fruit, the Hass avocado eventually became the dominant variety in California markets.
Dominance came in part because of what the Hass avocado wasn't. It wasn't too big or too small. It wasn't hard to fit into existing produce supply chains. It had flavor but it was bland enough not to challenge skittish American palates. The avocado may have been, as the ads said, "a rare gem of the jungle," but not now. Californians had domesticated it.
By the early 1970s, the Hass variety represented more than 80% of the avocados sold in California. By 2000, the Hass avocado had replaced nearly all other commercial varieties and had done much the same in the world's other subtropical growing regions.
The Hass avocado brings in more than a billion dollars a year for California growers. Rudolph Hass made less than $5,000 from his avocado patent by the time it expired in 1952, also the year he died. Nobody knows the origin of the seed that produced the "mother tree" from which all Hass avocados derive, but the tree's genetics seem to have been a hybrid of Guatemalan and Mexican ancestors. The original Hass tree died in September 2002.
What if the Hass cross of "wild" varieties had never happened? What if a single seed of that cross, pulled from a trash pile, hadn't been picked up and planted? What if the tree that grew from that seed had been culled as a seedling? What if Rudolph Hass had cut down the tree because it refused to accept Fuerte grafts? What if his children had been put off by its unlovely fruit?
Avocado growers talk of plant science, but their crop comes from a collection of chance discoveries, Indigenous heritages exploited and improbable survivals that were ultimately hitched to the power of California's industrialized agriculture. Something to think about when considering an order of avocado toast … and when considering any historical account.
Sources
Bender, Gary S. et al. Avocado Production in California: A Cultural Handbook for Growers. University of California Cooperative Extension, 2001.
Popenoe, Wilson and Zentmyer, G. A. "Early History of the Avocado." California Avocado Society Yearbook 81 (1997), 163-171.
Schroeder, C. A. "Dampier's Early Account of the Avocado." California Avocado Society Yearbook 63 (1979), 77-78.
"Carl Schmidt of Fuerte Fame Brings Himself Back to California." California Avocado Society Yearbook 33 (1948), 66-67.
