David Grandison Fairchild

David Fairchild in 1889, while employed at the United States Department of Agriculture

David Grandison Fairchild (April 7 1869 - August 6 1954) was an American botanist and plant explorer. Fairchild was responsible for the introduction of more than 20,000 exotic plants and varieties of established crops into the United States, including mangos, alfalfa, nectarines, dates, horseradish, bamboos, and flowering cherries. He was a member of the Fairchild family, descendants of Thomas Fairchild of Stratford, Connecticut.

Background

Fairchild was born in Lansing, Michigan, and was raised in Manhattan, Kansas. He graduated from Kansas State College of Agriculture (B.A. 1888, M.S. 1889) where his father, George Fairchild, was president. He continued his studies at Iowa State and at Rutgers with his uncle, Byron Halsted, a noted biologist. He received an honorary D.Sc. degree from Oberlin College in 1915.

Barbour Lathrop, a wealthy world traveler, persuaded Fairchild to became a plant explorer for the US Department of Agriculture. Lathrop and another wealthy patron, Allison Armor, financed some of Fairchild's many explorations for new plants to be introduced into the U.S. Fairchild was the author of a number of popular early books on his plant collecting expeditions. Of those early travels, Fairchild wrote, "I am glad that I saw a few of the quiet places of the world before the coming of automobiles ..." [The World Was my Garden, page 103].

In 1905, Fairchild married Marian, younger daughter of Alexander Graham Bell. For many years he managed the Department of Plant Introduction program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C., where among other accomplishments, he brought the cherry trees from Japan to Washington.

In 1926, the Fairchilds built a home on an 8-acre parcel on Biscayne Bay in Coconut Grove, Florida. They named it "The Kampong", after similar family compounds in Java, Indonesia, where Fairchild had spent so many happy days collecting plants. He covered this property with an extraordinary collection of rare tropical trees and plants and eventually wrote a book about the place, entitled "The World Grows Round my Door". In 1986, The Kampong became part of the National Tropical Botanical Garden. In 1938, he was honored by having the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables named after him.

His son, Alexander Graham Bell Fairchild lived and worked as a research entomologist for 33 years at the Gorgas Memorial Laboratory in the Republic of Panama. A daughter, Nancy Bell, marrried another entomologist, Marston Bates, author of many books on natural history. She herself wrote a book about living in rural Colombia during the 1940's: "East of the Andes and West of Nowhere".

Writings

Fairchild wrote four books that describe his extensive world travels and activities in introducing new plant species to the United States. In addition to sharing some of his legencary tropical botanical expertise, Fairchild provided graphic accounts of long-gone native cultures he was able to see before being "modernized". Fairchild was an accomplished photographer and illustrated these books himself. Those books include:

• The World Was my Garden: Travels of a Plant Explorer. (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1938)
• Garden Islands of the Great East: Collecting Seeds from the Philippines and Netherlands India in the Junk 'Chêng ho. (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1943)
• The World Grows Round My Door; The Story of The Kampong, a Home on The Edge of the Tropics. (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1947)
• Exploring for Plants. (New York: Macmillan, 1930).

In addition Fairchild and his wife, Marian, wrote an early work on macro photography of insects: "The Book of Monsters". (Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 1914). He also wrote many monographs about plants, plant exploring and the transportation and cultivation of new plants in the United States.

References

• Douglas, Marjory Stoneman. Adventures in a Green World: the Story of David Fairchild and Barbour Lathrop. (Coconut Grove, Florida: Field Research Projects, 1973)
• "Fairchild, David (Grandison)", Current Biography, 1953: 190-193.
• "Fairchild, David (Grandison)" (obituary), Current Biography, 1954: 266.
• "Fairchild, David Grandison." American National Biography (1999). 7:680-681. Also available in: American National Biography Online.
• "Fairchild, David Grandison." National Cyclopaedia of American Biography (1930). C:253-254

See also

• The Kampong, the home and personal introduction garden of David Grandison Fairchild

External links

• Complete bibliography
• David Gandison Fairchild in Everglades Biographies
• David Grandison Fairchild and The Kampong

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