![]() ![]() So much so that naturalist John Banister observed, “the Indians have, and ever had greater variety, and finer sorts of them than we.” Shortly before the Trail of Tears, William Bartram documented sizable peach orchards in the Cherokee and Creek lands of Appalachia and the Georgia piedmont.īut despite its popularity among Native Americans, the peach remained marginal in white, Southern agriculture before the Civil War. ![]() Peaches became so widespread that explorer John Lawson, in his 1709 A New Voyage to Carolina, mistakenly concluded this “Spontaneous Fruit of America” was “growing amongst them, before any Europeans came.” By selecting the best fruit to replant, Native Americans over time enriched the peach’s genetic heritage. The fruit was barbecued, stewed, and dried its bark, leaves, and pits treated bodily ailments. The Creek, Cherokee, and Seminole tribes, for their part, adopted the peach with evident enthusiasm. By 1571, missionaries had planted peach trees in St. As historian Tom Okie notes, Jesuit friars and Franciscan monks brought the fruit along with their civilizing agenda. The basic story is well known: Europeans got tomatoes and cocoa beans while Native Americans got, well, infectious disease and colonialism. Peaches made their inadvertent oceanic voyage to the Americas in what environmental historian Alfred Crosby famously called the Columbian Exchange. Spanish conquistadors sailed the Atlantic in the name of gold, glory, and God. In the foliage, peaches glinted “little vessels of comfort and joy in the midst of an otherwise bleak landscape.”įast forward to the 16 th century. (Its scientific name, prunus persica, still retains the antique nomenclature.) In Latin persicum became persica, pessica, the Old French pesche, the Old English peche and peoche, and finally peach. The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder (23–79 A.D.) called them “Persian apples” or persicum malum since, from his perspective, Persia was their most immediate source. Later, the peach traveled West, following the Silk Road. In Tao Qian’s fable “ Peach Blossom Spring,” written around 421 A.D., a fisherman stumbles upon a mystical grove of blossoming peach trees, which guard an ethereal land of abundance. The peach occupies a sacred, almost magical place in Chinese mythology. The oldest peach stones on record were unearthed in the remnants of Neolithic villages (6000–5000 B.C.) along the lower Yangtze River valley, placing the fruit’s ancestral origins in eastern China. These wrinkled pits are time capsules, allowing archaeologists to reconstruct the fruit’s spread in human society. Like its plum and apricot cousins in the prunus family, the peach carries a hard seed husk-its “stone”-beneath the fuzzy skin and flesh. The fruit’s journey to the state was remarkably circuitous. Next to Coca-Cola and trap music, the Georgia Peach may be one of the Southern state’s enduring cultural exports. Atlanta’s “Peach Drop” rivals the Big Apple’s ball drop on New Year’s Eve. Senate, the peach will adorn our “I Voted” stickers. When Georgians go to the polls on Tuesday to decide the fate of the U.S. In his song “Neon” from the 2001 album Room for Squares, John Mayer softly crooned, “Tonight she’s out to lose herself/ And find a high on Peachtree Street,” a main boulevard of Atlanta. From Macon to Valdosta, any child on the road to Florida could look out the window and spot the stone fruit everywhere: plastered on street signs and license plates, sculpted into water towers, and sold on roadside stands. They can absolutely still be used on fabric items just note they will appear more dull.Long before Timothée Chalamet lusted over a peach in Call Me by Your Name before the peach emoji, with its distinctive cleft, became a universal symbol for well-endowed buttocks and before Chick-fil-A introduced its seasonal peach milkshake in 2009 (still its best shake, hands down), the peach inspired a far more provincial image. I cannot guarantee color matching. Any glitter or shiny designs will work best on shiny/glossy substrates such as mugs, coasters, keychains and tumblers. Please note that various computers/phone screens and printers may show color differently.
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