Like a tomato itself, this represents a lucky, serendipitous convergence.

I have been a gardener as a profession for the last 15 years of my life, first working at a zoo and botanical garden, and then once I completed further studies, taking on private clients until I developed my own full time practice. I have always had an interest in cooking and growing food as well, and occasionally I have the opportunity to help my clients with their vegetable gardens in addition to ornamentals. I believe in the tradition of saving seeds, and think that in addition to selecting for flavor and color, there is the chance to further adapt varieties to the local environment, meaning they might use less water, or set fruit at lower or higher temperatures, or be more resilient against local pest and disease pressures, or just be generally more productive in that area.

Hybrids, which are a cross of two varieties, have often been selected for taste and vigor as well as for the commercial reason that the seeds will not be “true” or grow a plant the same as the parent. Because you can’t save true seeds, they won’t develop as a variety over time, with your tastes and your local environment leading them to become treasured parts of life. So hybrids, including SunGold and Valentine Grape (from which you are also patentedly prohibited from saving seeds) are not for me, although I can understand why people like them.

In the course of looking for open-pollinated/heirloom seeds that can be saved year after year, my curiosity led me to try growing hundreds of types of tomatoes to see which grew best here in the Bay Area. Then it clicked that I could even try breeding them, and my attempts at breeding were successful. And so growing them and breeding them reinforced each other as activities; growing them to breed them, breeding them to grow them- finding varieties that other people have saved or made and growing and breeding those too.

My mom is my inspiration for following my curiosity and for taking an artistic approach to life. She is an internationally-acclaimed natural perfumer and founder of the Aftel Archive of Curious Scents, a world-class museum dedicated to natural perfume materials and history. My Saturday job is to help curate the museum, and on one Saturday I was turning the pages in Gerard’s Herbal 1633 (one of three large “herbals” available for visitors to look through) and found an entry for “Poma Amoris” or Love Apples! It was a name for tomatoes that didn’t stick in English or botanically in Latin, but the romance of it captivated me.

When they were first introduced to the New World they were called Poma Amoris “Apples of Love” or Pomo d’Oro “Golden Apple” and they are still known as pomodoro in Italian. The entry for Poma Amoris in Gerard’s Herbal from 1663: “very long round stalkes… fat and full of juice, trailing upon the ground, not able to sustaine himselfe upright by reason of the tendernesse of the stalkes, and also the great weight of the leaves and fruit wherewith it is surcharged. / faire and goodly apples, chamfered, uneven, and bunched out in many places; of a bright shining red colour, and the bignesse of a goose egge or a large pippin. The pulpe or meat is verie full of moisture, soft, reddish, and of the substance of a wheat plumme. /The whole plant is of a ranke and stinking savour. /In Spain and those hot Regions they use to eat the Apples prepared and boiled with pepper, salt and oile; but they yeeld very little nourishment to the bodie… “ (p346).

I doubt the person writing that description could have imagined that over the next four hundred years, tomatoes as they would come to be called, would become one of the world’s most consumed vegetables (technically it is a fruit), behind only potatoes in pounds per capita eaten. I’m sure it would amaze them to know that they would become an integral part of so many cultures and cuisines, and it would boggle their mind to see the tomatoes of today, in their multitude of colors, shapes and sizes.

The number of tomato varieties has exploded. So many heirlooms have been documented and shared thanks to people saving seeds, like Craig LeHoullier and the late Carolyn Male and the people at the Seed Savers Exchange. So many great new open-pollinated varieties that have been created by people like Craig LeHoullier, Lee Goodwin of J&L Gardens, Brad Gates of Wild Boar Farms, Karen Olivier of Northern Gardener, Ellie of Bunny Hop Seeds, Bill Yoder, and so many others.

In the course of my research, I discovered the Charles Rick UC Davis Tomato Genetic Resource Center. Tomatoes originated as a species in Peru, and were then domesticated in Mexico over the course of thousands of years. Charles Rick was a pioneer in collecting wild species of tomato relatives from South America and then using them to improve tomatoes through breeding. Some of the wild tomato relatives have genes that are not in tomatoes, but that were in them at one point evolutionarily, and can be bred back into them. The TGRC was responsible for many developments in tomato breeding. Traits like disease resistance and sugar levels, and some things that helped tomatoes be grown and processed more efficiently industrially (jointless pedicels, squareness so they won’t roll off conveyors, uniform ripening). I am not interested in jointless pedicels or squareness, or uniform ripeness (which is actually detrimental flavor development), but some traits like higher soluble solids (SS) which correlates to sugar, Brix levels, and tastiness, from Solanum chemielsky, along with the Intense pigment (Ip) gene, and a Delta orange gene from Solanum pennellii, are of interest to my experiments. I applied to the TGRC for some of the tomato seeds with these wild relative genes, and was able to get some to use in breeding projects, and I’m very excited to see what develops.

The New Zealand organization called Heritage Food Crops Research Trust has found that tomatoes with the “tangerine orange” gene have added health benefits, as the form of lycopene they contain is more available to the body fresh than that in red tomatoes. They also suggest that the tangerine orange gene is on an earlier evolutionary pathway, so that before tomatoes were red or yellow, they were orange!

People on forums like TomatoJunction share their growing experiences and experiments in breeding, and are invaluable sources of knowledge and a supportive community.

With all these varieties and all this information available, it is an amazing time to be saving seeds, breeding tomatoes and enjoying the fruits of those efforts!