{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title":"Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","uuid":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title":"Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture","normalized_title":"timeconsumptionandeverydaylifepracticematerialityandculture","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"isbns":[],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":236,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Time%2C%20Consumption%20and%20Everyday%20Life%20Practice%2C%20Materiality%20and%20Culture","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/search"},"page":{"printed_page":117,"pdf_page":118,"physical_index":118,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"6ef466b8c7c185f5d79a323973d5673e029e8bd382de23e3792a001455001d63"},"chapter":"List of Tables and Figures","content":"From growing fields across the country, purveyors of seeds gathered what I believe to be the largest variety of products of any nineteenth-century business. The diversity of nature was augmented by the science of plant breeding to the point where each catalogue offered literally thousands of different products, or species and varieties of seeds. While the first years of the nineteenth century still offered botanists and plant hunters unexplored territory in North America, by the end of the century the American frontier famously had been declared ‘closed’ by the historian Frederick Jackson Turner. Plants were no longer as likely to be discovered by natural historians as created by plant breeders, often working in a commercial context. Publication of new species was still the right of those who developed and named the new strains, but was likely to come in commercial rather than scientific catalogues. This emphasis on hybrids unique to a given company was frequent in later nineteenth-century catalogues and continues to the present day.\n\nWhite’s description of the seed trade ephemera he received in January 1952 raises many of the qualities that were sought through plant breeding. With flowers, both purveyors and consumers looked for new colours or colour combinations; large, or double, blossoms; and quantity of blossoms per stem or plant. With produce, the desire for good colour, size and prolific nature continued, along with the shortest possible sowing to harvesting time. Prolific bearing on small plants was a particular boon for those growing to feed their family or sell their produce at market. Any quality deemed favourable in a plant might be the object of selection and breeding to ensure the continuation of that quality. Seed companies vied with one another to create, or purchase from creators, particular strains and varieties of vegetables that they believed would be attractive to growers; the new names for varieties often reflected the firm or breeder who developed them, so that even when sold by other companies, the seeds would provide advertising for a competitor.\n\nPlant breeding had several effects on consumer behaviour in the seed trade. First, newly acquired strains and hybrids were part of the annual package that each catalogue offered to make one firm stand out from another. The ‘novelties’ for each year were often included in a separate section of seed catalogues, even printed on coloured paper to draw attention, suggesting the value of the work that botanists and breeders carried out each year, creating new strains for the consuming public. More importantly, ‘new’ seeds provided a reason for prospective consumers to purchase seeds: to grow plants they could not otherwise obtain and to continue growing them. Nineteenth-century botany did not appear to have as its aim the halting of the natural growth cycle that we find in today’s ‘terminator seeds’. Nonetheless, the common wisdom of the day taught that the seeds of hybrid plants were not productive of further generations of plants, at least not those reliably true to the original: for example, if a new strain was created by crossing two others, the seeds from the ‘novelty’ plant might revert to one of the ‘parent’ plants. Thus, in developing the unique qualities of hybrids, whether the deepest colour and largest blossom of flower or the earliest and most prolific bearer of fruit, seed companies were also ensuring that customers would return to them each year for a new supply of seeds. Ironically, ‘heirloom’ seeds, seen as an antidote to the intervention with the natural world according to human priorities, now serve as the ‘novelties’ in contemporary seed catalogues.\n\nCalendars and Clocks\n\n117","previous_page":116,"next_page":118}