I don’t ever remember reading about any of the great names in the history that I was taught as a boy suffering agonizing toothache. Neither Napoleon, Wellington, Washington or Captain Bligh of HMS Bounty. And of course all kinds of people get the best kind of jobs. Just look around you! Captain Bligh’s career went from bad to worse after his escapade with his boatload of breadfruit seedlings, but what of the man from Kew Gardens who collected and started to grow them on the island of Tahiti? Now that is what I call a great job. Sadly, his breadfruit plants were slung overboard and he joined Bligh on his stupendous 3000 mile journey to the Americas, while Fletcher Christian and his men sailed away on the Bounty to settle on Pitcairn Island.
Although Bligh had to learn a great deal about man management, he repeated the journey again. This time he was successful and landed breadfruit in the West Indies. The rest, as they say, is history. Except that the breadfruit did not set fire to the imagination of the slaves for whom it was introduced, and whose descendants still prefer yam, cassava and sweet potato. It is claimed that there is one tree from the original lot left, and that it is found in the St Vincent Botanic Garden. Knowing something about the rate of growth of breadfruit and its habits, and being an old cynic, I would need to spend a bit of time looking at the records to accept that this is an original rather than a sucker from one of the original trees. Whatever the fact of the matter, there is no doubt that the breadfruit Artocarpus altilis (arto from the Greek, meaning a loaf of bread; carpus from the Greek, meaning fruit) is a splendid tree for its speed of growth, the architectural value of its general growth habit and leaf shapes, and for its fruit. It is fairly widespread along the coastal strip of Guyana, though I suspect not used as much as it should be.
There are two forms of breadfruit. One with the seed embedded in the flesh of the fruit, which is called breadnut(chataigne in the islands), and the more common one without seeds. The seed of the breadfruit (breadnuts) germinate quite easily if they are removed from the pulp, but the most common method of propagation and the way it has probably been done more than any other for centuries, is by root suckers, one of which I am just about to plant in my garden (no doubt a distant relative of one of Bligh’s introductions, as are all the breadfruit trees growing in Guyana).
I remember telling readers several years ago that I had a very large breadfruit tree in my garden in Barbados. In dry weather and before it fell over and died, it would drop a great number of leaves in the dry weather, really to reduce the water loss, and in the wet season it would hardly drop any. It had an unfortunate habit of dropping limbs in heavy rains due to the weight of water I suppose, and in fact due to poor anchorage, it finally keeled over in a rain storm.
A few years ago a lot of friends of mine, ignoring my warnings about throwing good money after bad, made absolute fortunes betting on a horse in Britain called Psidium. I should have known better and put my shirt on it. Psidium guajava is the Latin name for the guava. There are more than 100,000 acres planted in India, and it is widely planted commercially in Florida. I love guava jam and jelly, which is why I persisted with my old tree, but I really should have cut it down a long time before I actually did and planted something that gave me a feeling of pleasure rather than irritation.
It seems that whatever I did achieved nothing to improve its bearing capacity or the quality of the fruit. It was clearly a case of a selected seedling which hadn’t inherited any of the good qualities from its parents. It brings home the importance of selecting plants from parents having all the right characteristics.
