2018 ASHS Annual Conference

Dr. David Fairchild was born in 1969 in East Lansing, Michigan. He became a plant pathologist, geneticist and world renowned plant explorer. At 20 years of age, he joined the United States Department of Agriculture as a pathologist. In 1897, Fairchild and his friend Walter Swingle convinced Secretary James Wilson to start a new program he named “the Section of Foreign Seed and Plant introduction”. Fairchild was immediately hired to run it. He traveled the world with wealthy sponsors Lathrop Barbour and later on with Alison Armour who funded some of his plant explorations. He was passionate about introducing Americans to the foods of the world he visited through introductions and subsequent selection. By the time he retired from the USDA, 111,857 varieties of plants and seeds were introduced into the US by Fairchild and his plant hunters. Among them were apricots, apples, muskmelons from Chinese Turkestan; citron from Corsica; nectarines from Pakistan; cherries from Siberia; dates from Egypt and Algeria; pear cultivars from Germany; and many clones of mango and avocado now important to Florida’s industry. In 1912, he also helped coordinate the arrival of the Japanese flowering cherry trees that blossom each spring around Washington's Tidal Basin. He published over 400 articles and four books. The Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden was established with his help on an 83-acre site south of Miami purchased by Colonel Robert Montgomery and named in his honor of his friend. The garden opened its doors to the public in 1938 and continues his work collecting, documenting, preserving and studying tropical and subtropical plants from around the world.