The Gifted Gardener: Antoine
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Antoine. No last name. Creole. Not much information to sift through, as is unfortunately the case with the histories of most enslaved people. But the plenty of pecans, the ubiquity of the beloved pecan pie in America, the success of the pecan industry, can all be traced back to this black man—enslaved on a Louisiana plantation in 1840s, whose grafting technique allowed the selection and propagation of superior pecan trees.
Pecans— rich in nutritional content— have been referred to as “America’s most important contribution to the world’s stock of edible nuts,” were once considered incapable of industrialization because of the nut’s fickleness. Although pecans had been a dietary staple of natives of pre-colonial central and eastern regions of North America and the river valleys of Mexico, and captured the interest of many explorers and Founding Fathers of America, producing pecan trees was difficult. The journey to its domestication was long, arduous and filled with many failed experiments. The first U.S. pecan planting took place in Long Island, NY, in 1772, but it took trees too long to bear fruit compared to other trees. Another problem was that no two pecan trees were the same. Between leaf shape, size, branching, quality and nut production timing, the trees varied drastically.
Before Antoine, Andre Michaux—a French explorer and botanist—thought grafting pecan twigs to black walnut trunks would work. It didn’t, but the idea of grafting was a step in the right direction. In 1822 in South Carolina, Dr. Abner Landrum attempted to propagate pecans by joining pecan buds to young hickory trees. He was sometimes successful, but there was no viable market for his efforts. Then in the early 1840s, on the Anita Plantation, there was a verdant pecan tree that produced regularly. Dr. A.E. Colomb, a local pecan enthusiast, attempted grafting twigs from this tree to other pecan trees. It was after his failure that he crossed the Mississippi river to Oak Alley, to find out about the rumored talented gardener who worked for J.T. Roman.
Antoine was one of Roman’s 113 slaves. He was 38-years old at the time, and worked in Oak Alley’s gardens. He was known as a man skilled with plants. Dr. Colomb arrived at Oak Alley and gave pecan graftwood to Roman. Roman gave it to Antoine, who began grafting. It is said that sixteen of Antoine’s first grafts were successful. Antoine eventually grafted 126 trees at Oak Alley. Antoine’s ability to produce nuts of high quality was from tying the roots from a tree with premium pecans to those of a lesser tree. This helped the lesser one produce premium nuts. Antoine’s clone won the “Best Pecan Exhibited” award at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876. It was duly recorded as the first official planting of an improved variety of pecans.
Antoine mastered this method of propagating individual pecan trees, and it was copied far and wide, paving the way for uniformity, and therefore, industrialization.
Today, pecans of over a thousand varieties are grown on every continent save Antarctica. “A Creole Negro gardener and expert grafter of pecan trees,” was all J.T. Roman marked next to Antoine’s name in his ledger, but Antoine’s effect, his legacy, is more than a sentence, more than a book. From pies to candy, raw or roasted, the effects of Antoine’s innovation reverberate around the world.
