Slightly younger than Nehrling and Simpson, and known personally to both, was out next giant of the heyday of Florida Horticulture, David Fairchild. As with all who went before, Fairchild had a pre-Florida career before settling permanently here. He came from a high-level academic family with a family-wide predilection for Agriculture and Plant Science. One uncle was President of Oberlin College. David’s father was a Professor at Michigan State University and went on to the presidency of Kansas State University.
David Fairchild, Courtesy of the University Archives, University of Miami Libraries, with permission
David’s education was in the area of Plant Pathology, which led him (with the help of a connected uncle) into a position in 1889 with the USDA in Washington, DC. After some early days studying plant diseases in a laboratory, David hit the road traveling the world in search of plants to introduce to the U.S., especially to California, to the Washington, DC area, and to Florida.
Living in Washington DC, Fairchild demonstrated a lifelong genius for politics and cultivation of important relationships. He helped lobby a congressional appropriations bill to launch the new USDA Section of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction, of which he was the sparkplug and Director for most of the rest of his working life. That congressional coup was magnified by Fairchild’s long-term wealthy and cosmopolitan benefactor Barbour Lathrop, who encouraged and funded much of David’s globetrotting. At its peak the Section was introducing 10 species per day, and put out a catalog listing over 100,000 introductions.
The Section of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction operated a series of plant introduction gardens across the country. Florida was of special interest. A garden in Brooksville focused primarily on bamboos. Tropical plants and a place to grow them were priorities, so a garden in the Miami Area was necessary. Securing the land was not easy, and occurred with a little assistance from Henry Flagler. A small garden appeared in 1898 on Brickell Avenue on the Miami River, in Miami. To this day, Brickell Avenue is choice real estate, and was later landscaped by William Lyman Phillips (see below). The land was a donation from Mrs. Brickell herself. Introductions outgrew the site, and in 1914, yet another wealthy benefactor, Charles Deering, whose brother built Vizcaya, donated 25 acres at Buena Vista seven miles north of the Brickell Ave. garden. The two operated simultaneously as the big garden and the little garden.
Still on his political game, in 1920 Fairchild negotiated the partial transfer of 95 acres of the WWI training airfield, Chapman Field, to the USDA a plant introduction garden, with more acreage added in subsequent years, bring the facility to 197 acres. Operations shifted to Chapman Field in 1923. Fairchild is credited with about 30,000 plant introductions.
Although Fairchild did not live in Florida during most of his working life, his personal contacts and professional activities tied him to the state, and in 1916 the Fairchilds bought a property on Biscayne Bay, naming it the Kampong. Marian Fairchild was the daughter of Alexander Graham Bell. They built a house and retired onto that horticultural oasis in 1928, living there until David’s death in 1954. In its prime, the Kampong and Fairchild’s earlier homes hosted VIPs familiar to history: his father-in-law Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, Barbour Lathrop, Orville Wright, and Fairchild’s Miami neighbor Charles Torrey Simpson. Fairchild had friends in high places. Today the Kampong is a satellite facility of the National Tropical Botanic Garden. In 1930, the botanical garden that bears David Fairchild’s name came to be. For that, we’ll switch another VIP, William Lyman Phillips.
[Major Fairchild Resource: Fairchild, D. The World Was My Garden, Travels of a Plant Explorer. xiv + 494 pp. Scribners 1938. Reprinted by Fairchild Tropical Garden 1982.]
Florida Horticulture History 