Wild Relations: Jack Harlan and the True Origins of Agriculture
This botanical history post was featured on The Daily Gardener podcast:
June 7, 1917
On this day, dear readers, we welcome into our world one Jack Harlan, a botanist whose passion for plants would rival even the most devoted of garden enthusiasts.
Like a well-bred heir following the family business, Harlan stepped confidently into the botanical footprints left by his father, Harry Harland—though I daresay the son's adventures proved far more intriguing than most family inheritances.
While you and I might consider a journey abroad as an opportunity for leisure or perhaps a scandalous dalliance, our Jack Harlan viewed expeditions as glorious chances to collect plants—primarily seeking new genetic material for the USDA's crop breeding programs. How marvelously practical!
What troubled our botanical hero most profoundly, my dear gardeners, was not society's whispers or fashion's fickle changes, but rather the alarming prospects of genetic vulnerability and genetic wipeout.
A concern far more consequential than who danced with whom at last season's garden party, wouldn't you agree?
Harlan declared with admirable conviction:
"We MUST collect and study wild and weedy relatives of our cultivated plants... we cannot afford to ignore any source of useable genes."
These words flowed from his pen in 1970, when many of us were more concerned with what to plant in our spring borders than the preservation of global crop diversity.
In one of his final scholarly pronouncements—and I share this with you in strictest confidence as it rather upends conventional wisdom—Harlan asserted:
"We will not and cannot find a time or place where agriculture originated.
We will not and cannot because it did not happen that way.
Agriculture is not the result of a happening, an idea, an invention, discovery or instruction by a god or goddess.
It emerged as a result of long periods of intimate coevolution between plants and man.
Animals are not essential; plants supply over 90% of the food consumed by humans."
How refreshing to encounter such clarity!
While society clings to its cherished myths of divine agricultural inspiration, Harlan boldly strips away pretense to reveal the long dance between humankind and the plant world.
A co-evolution, my dears—not unlike the careful negotiations between companions in a particularly long and complicated marriage.
As you tend your gardens this season, perhaps pause to consider the wild relatives of your cultivated darlings.
These untamed cousins, with their stubborn resilience and unrefined habits, may hold secrets worth preserving—genetic treasures that might save their more domesticated relations from future calamity.
One wonders what Jack Harlan would make of our modern gardens, with their hybridized showpieces and carefully curated displays.
Would he applaud our horticultural achievements or urge us to make room for the wild and weedy ancestors?
I rather suspect the latter, though naturally, he would express it with scientific precision rather than my humble literary flourishes.
