George M. Darrow
George McMillan Darrow (born February 2, 1889 in Springfield (Vermont) , † June 9, 1983 in Maryland ) was an American pomologist and specialist in strawberries and their culture. He worked for 46 years as pomologist the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) of the Ministry of Agriculture of the United States (United States Department of Agriculture, USDA), bred for it new berry varieties. He is the co-discoverer of the boysenberry .
Life and professional history
Darrow was born on February 2, 1889 on a springfield, Vermont dairy farm. He attended Middlebury College, which he graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1910. He then studied horticulture at Cornell University , New York and graduated in 1911 with a Master of Arts. On July 1, 1911, he took up a position as a research assistant for fruit growing at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), where he initially studied the transport, processing, storage and refrigeration of sweet cherries, loganberries and plums concerned.
From 1912 he worked in a four-year research project in the states of Tennessee , Kentucky and West Virginia , where he mapped the fruit-growing regions and described the fruit varieties of the individual states. From 1916 he began studies on the cultivation and variety of berries.
In 1918 and 1919 he did military service as a hospital sergeant at Fort McPherson in East Point, Georgia. In 1919 he married Grace Chapman (1890-1977), with whom he had 6 children.
After completing his military service, he resumed studies in berry cultivation in 1919 and began his first attempts at crossbreeding with strawberries in the winter of 1920. In the spring of 1920, he began working with Walter Van Fleet, who was selecting breeds of strawberry and raspberry varieties in the USDA's test garden in Glenn Dale, Maryland. After Van Fleet's death in 1922, he continued his work and became head of the berry breeding division in 1928.
In 1929, he introduced the strawberry variety Blakemore to the market as the first of 24 berry cultivars.
In 1927, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore awarded him a Ph.D. for plant physiology and genetics.
While he worked first in Glen Dale and later in Beltsville, Maryland, he began in the late 1920s to set up a breeding program for berries in Oregon . He gained a lot of fame as an expert in the cultivation and breeding of strawberries, but also dealt with the breeding of blackberries , raspberries and blueberries . In 1956 and 1957 Darrow took a trip to the South American Andes , where he picked indigenous strawberries.
In his 46 years of service, Darrow published more than 230 publications before retiring in 1957. After retiring, he continued to work as an advisor to the Department of Agriculture and worked on the book The Strawberry: History, Breeding and Physiology , published in 1966.
Darrow was passionate about growing daylilies and after retiring he began building a daylily collection on his Olallie farm in Maryland. He is the breeder of more than 50 registered daylily hybrids, including the variety 'Olallie George Darrow' (1978). In 1979, his son Dan brought cuttings of the daylily plants to his farm in Vermont (Olallie Farm North) to continue his father's work there.
Darrow died in Maryland in 1983. He bequeathed his numerous notes, photographs and manuscripts to the National Agricultural Library of the United States Department of Agriculture, where they are part of the Special Collections.
Discovery of the boysenberry
In the late 1920s, Darrow heard reports of a large, reddish-purple berry that a gardener named Rudolph Boysen grew from a cross between blackberry and loganberry on his farm in Napa , Northern California. Together with the southern California berry expert and farmer Walter Knott, he began to research the berry. Darrow and Knott found that Boysen had abandoned and sold his farm after an accident. They searched the fallow farm and found some weed-overgrown vines that they dug up and planted and propagated on Knott's farm in Buena Park , California. Darrow and Knott named the berry in honor of her breeder as boysenberry .
Walter Knott was the first farmer to commercially cultivate and market boysenberries. On his farm, Knott ran a street stall selling berries. In 1934 his wife Cordelia began selling boysenberry cakes and roasted chicken in addition to berries, which over time developed into a restaurant. When the restaurant was doing so well that there were sometimes long waiting times, Knott built a ghost town from 1940 to entertain the guests. In 1968 the farm, on which more and more attractions were built, was fenced in and admission was charged. Walter Knott's berry farm eventually developed into Knott's Berry Farm amusement park .
Awards and honors
- In 1948 the American Pomological Society awarded him the Wilder Medal, named after its founder Marshall Pinckney Wilder , for his work on berries .
- In 1954 the USDA presented him with the Distinguished Service Award for his services in the area of breeding and improving berry varieties.
- The Darrow blackberry variety , bred by the New York State Fruit Testing Cooperative Association in 1946, was named in honor of George Darrow in 1956.
- In 1963, George Darrow was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of North Carolina .
- In 1968 he received the Liberty Hyde Bailey Award from the American Society for Horticultural Science (ASHS) , and in 1993 he was inducted into the ASHS Hall of Fame as the eighth member.
- A daylily found by SY Hu on the Russian island of Sakhalin was named Hemerocallis darrowiana in 1969 in honor of George Darrow . The species is now considered lost.
Publications
Books
- Strawberry Varieties and Species to Duration of the Daily Light Period. USDA Technical Bulletin No. 453, 1931
- The Strawberry: History, Breeding and Physiology. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York 1966
Technical article
- GM Darrow, AE Longley: Cytological Studies of Diploid and Polyploid Forms in Raspberries. In: Journal of Agricultural Research. 1924, pp. 737-748.
- GM Darrow: Sterility and Fertility in the Strawberry. In: Journal of Agricultural Research. 1927, pp. 393-411.
- GM Darrow: Experimental Studies on the Growth and Development of Strawberry Plants. In: Journal of Agricultural Research. 1930, pp. 307-325.
- GM Darrow, AE Longley: Cytology and Breeding of Rubus macropetalus, the Logan, and Related Blackberries. In: Journal of Agricultural Research. 1933, pp. 315-330.
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ Entry on Olallie George Darrow in the daylily database of the American Hemerocallis Society (AHS), accessed on October 5, 2014
- ↑ G. Darrows Collection on the homepage of the Special Collections of the National Agricultural Library (NAL)
- ↑ http://www.oregon-berries.com/pick-a-berry/boysenberry/ , accessed on October 5, 2014
- ^ GL Slate, J. Watson: The Darrow Blackberry and Clyde Purple Raspberry. In: Cornell University's New York State Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin No. 796, January 1963, pp. 1-3
- ↑ Homepage of the Olallie Daylily Gardens ( Memento of the original from September 12, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed October 5, 2014
- ^ SY Hu: A new Daylily Species from Sakhalin Island. In: The Hemerocallis Journal. Vol. 23 (# 4), 1969, pp. 42-43
literature
- Middlebury College: Middlebury College magazine,: volume 58, The College, Middlebury, Vt., 1983
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Darrow, George M. |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Darrow, George McMillan |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American horticultural scientist and pomologist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 2, 1889 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Springfield (Vermont) |
| DATE OF DEATH | June 9, 1983 |
| Place of death | Maryland |