ISSUE 70, EXTRAORDINARY VEGETABLES, Part 1: Motherland Okra

Motherland Okra

Jon Jackson’s Liberian mother conveyed the seeds to the ex-U. S. Army Airborne Ranger.  He grew them out at Comfort Farms outside Milledgeville, Georgia.  They grew tall.  Fourteen feet tall.  And the pods forming on stalks above your head were curiously shaped—bulbous, with a point.  But the leaves were what most surprised.  Broad, green, and mallow-like.  They were edible, like mallow leaves, and a touch mucilaginous, as you would expect from an okra. 

Over the years I’ve seen a lot of okra growing in the South and in the West Indies.  I’ve seen several stands that grew as tall as Motherland.  I’ve seen one in Trinidad that grew taller; it was a stand that made the idea of an okra forest seem not too outlandish.  What I have not seen before are the broad leaves and bulbous pod. 

Numbers of landraces of African okra were brought to North America on the middle passage.  There were several configurations of pod—long skinny, short barrel, sharply ridge, smooth columnar.  There were several colors—white, red, dark green, pale green.  Most strains had abundant bristles or spines on the pods.  A few were relatively free of these.  There was no great market impetus for breeding these landraces toward any one configuration during the 19th century.  Seed catalogs spoke of “long pod” and “dwarf.” The White Velvet Okra was bred at the end of the 19th century in the midst of a national white food craze.  The 1890s were the era of white cucumbers, white apples, white snap beans, white celery, white asparagus, and white okra.  Red okra did not become popular until the 1950s. 

There is reason to believe that early in its history in North America, when precious seeds brought from West Africa, were planted in the huck patches of enslaved Africans, that they planted every variety of okra they had, hoping that one or another of the strains would take.  Traditional cultivators know that seed nurtured in one soil in one clime can respond strangely when planted in another locale with different conditions.  Sometimes it doesn’t sprout at all.  Soo all of the African strains were grown out, they cross pollinated, and whatever distinction once pertained was lost in what we might call “mash up okra.”  Many different mixtures were contained in the strains grown through the 19th and early 20th century in the South.  In the early 1930s a Clemson University extension agent, Dora D. Walker, noticed an okra patch outside of Lancaster that displayed spectacular diversity.  From that patch the Clemson Spineless okra would be created over the 1930s. 

The okra patch she spotted had been maintained by Thomas Davis in Lancaster, South Carolina from 188o to 1929.  For almost a half century it remained a private population manifesting extraordinary diversity, including the trait of spinelessness. Davis’s okra “included a mixture of strains, several of which have now been segregated including types with tall, medium, and dwarf plants having pods ranging from almost white to dark green in color.” (March 12, 1937).  The extraordinary diversity and the spinelessness trait were particularly noticed  by Dora D. Walker who brought it to the notice of the South Carolina Experimental Station south of Charleston.  From 1930 to 1937 R. A. McGinty assisted by F. S. Andrews, J. A. Martin, and L. E. Scott, at the station selected and perfected the plant until its traits stabilized. They adopted the Perkin’s long pod, the most popular early 20th century variety, as the ideal form to which to shape the landrace.  They achieved this in 1937. In 1939 the Clemson Spineless Okra won the All-American Silver Medal, making its national reputation. 

But it sounds as though the breeders could have created any of a half dozen forms of okra from Davis’s population.  McGinty was all about the pod.  But perhaps more edible matter resides in the leaves.  In Africa they are greatly esteemed as fodder as well as human food, and several medicinal properties are ascribed to it.

For all the diversity that southern okra landraces maintain—and Chris Smith of the Utopian Seed Project has studied many of the surviving strains—none possess the shape and quality of Jon Jackson’s “Motherland.”  Which poses the question just how many landraces did not come over three centuries ago? 

Jon Jackson is making seed available through Baker Creek Heirloom Seed.