ISSUE 99, GREAT PLANT BREEDERS, Part 6: James Moore & better Blackberries

James Moore

When I think of the berry breeder who personally influenced my life for the better, Dr. James Moore of the University of Arkansas comes to mind. He was responsible for the vast improvement of blackberries on produce stands in the South. He made his University the great rival to Oregon State University in shaping the modern commercial forms of rubus—raspberries, loganberries, boysenberries, and blackberries.

A native of Arkansas, Jim Moore took his B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Arkansas after serving a stint in the Air Force. Earning a Ph.D. from Rutgers in Plant Breeding, Moore was hired by the USDA to work at the central Beltsville, MD, station. Moore labored there for three years, from 1961 through 1963, dealing with stone fruits, grapes, and small fruits. He had a singular breadth of interests, more typical of plant breeders of the early 20^th century than the specialists of the mid-20^th century. His superiors found him invaluable, but he found himself at odds with the people and culture of the D.C. metro area. He wanted to return to Arkansas and proposed that the University found a fruit breeding program that he would administer. The University approved the plan and Moore resigned from the USDA.

Moore brought 1960s state-of-the-art knowledge about breeding for disease resistance and cultivation convenience. Because Clemson University, NC State, and LSU pursued vegetable breeding with great success, Moore moved Arkansas’s program toward fruits designed for optimum performance in the heat and humidity of the American South. During the 33 years he presided over the program, he created the famous series of blackberries, each bearing the name of a Native American nation; his Cardinal strawberry remains a fixture at u-pick farms its large size and sweet flavor appeal to children; his Bonfire peach was a beautiful dwarf ornamental, grown for its dark red foliage and profuse pinkish red blossoms; his Reliance and Mars table grapes, while not much suited to deep South culture, provided California grape breeders the genetics to create the landmark Candy Cotton grape; and the Ozarkblue Blueberry was a high bush variety adapted to southern cultivation. Yet of these “hits” Moore’s blackberries were the most consequential. His thornless floricane blackberry, Navajo, boasted multiple virtues: size, small seeds, sumptuous berry flavor, disease resistance, and ease of harvesting. It would blaze the path forward for Arkansas Blackberry breeding, including the Ouichita, and the primacane varieties that could generate fruit in one season rather than the usual two. Moore was fortunate in finding a protégé, Dr. John Clark, who could take over the work of the program after 1996 when Moore stepped down.

I confess I don’t have much patience with people who enthuse over the seedy wild sharpness of the naturalized blackberries (usually the invasive Himalayan blackberry) in their neighborhoods. Yes I picked them off neighborhood bushes in my younger years, but the bushes shredded my skin, the fruit tended to be small, they often ripened unevenly so that there were always a few bitter red drupes there with the black on the fruit. Give me a carton of Shawnee, or Navaho, or Ouichita, or a late season berry bred by John Clark. The Moore berries were never flavorless, as I find the Triple Crown to be.

Dr. James Moore died in January of 2017. He may suffer the fate that many modern breeders do of have their creations supplanted by later developments of their genetics performed by successors. But Moore will live on because of the wisdom encapsulated in the 1975 book Advances in Fruit Breeding, the most important manual of the art and science of fruit breeding since the USDA yearbooks of the 1930s. His 1996 trilogy, Fruit Breeding, elaborates on his insights further. These are books that should be on the shelves of anyone interested in American fruit.