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Dunmore Pineapple (built 1761)

Pineapple mania, also known as pineapple fever, was approximately a 150-year period from the early 18th century to the mid to late 19th century when European royalty and horticulturists were obsessed with cultivating pineapple due to its novel introduction from the New World and its legendary status as the ultimate exemplar of a perfect fruit. The difficulty of growing pineapples in a cold climate contributed to its scarcity and its inordinate expense, making it an elite, luxury fruit and an acknowledged symbol of great wealth, power, status, and conspicuous consumption. Unlike most fruits known at the time that had a large body of knowledge and literature stretching back to antiquity, the pineapple emerged as a kind of tabula rasa, giving rise to imaginative flights of fantasy that quickly took root in popular culture. This new perception would later influence cuisine, the decorative arts, architecture, philosophy, and technology throughout Europe and the newly formed United States.

In contrast to the economic bubble of Tulip mania from 1634 to 1637, where prices varied drastically within a small time frame, the price of pineapples dropped gradually over many decades, and by the late 19th century, while still expensive, pineapples could be eaten as a special treat by the general public, which contributed to the loss of its luxury status and its obsession by elites. As the wealthy moved on to new status symbols, the end of pineapple mania occurred at the exact time pineapple agricultural practices were perfected, hot water heating became commonplace, steamships shortened delivery time, shipping became refrigerated, and industrialization and mechanization led to the modern canning process in the early 20th century, making the pineapple available to everyone and far easier to obtain in the marketplace than to grow locally. The last vestiges of pineapple mania disappeared, after most British estate gardeners with the specialized knowledge required to grow pineapples, enlisted or were conscripted in World War I and were killed on the battlefield.

Background

Pineapple (Ananas comosus) is a species in the bromeliad family native to tropical America, thought to have long been cultivated by the indigenous Tupi and Guaraní people in the area of what is now known as Brazil, Colombia, Guyana, and Venezuela, with the plant cultivated and distributed from South America to Central America and the Caribbean islands long before the arrival of Europeans. On his second transatlantic voyage to the New World from 1493–1496, Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) arrived in the Caribbean islands in November 1493. He explored the island of Guadeloupe for six days, finding pineapple for the first time in a village inhabited by the Kalina people (Caribs). Impressed by its taste and smell, the expedition stocked up on copious amounts of the fruit to bring back to the King of Spain, but only one survived the journey. Columbus called the fruit piña de Indes ("pine of the Indians").

Introduction to Europe

Columbus returned to Spain from his second voyage on June 11, 1496. He presented a single, surviving specimen of pineapple, along with other unique species he discovered, to Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile, the Catholic Monarchs of Spain. Italian historian Peter Martyr d'Anghiera (1457–1526) recorded the event in his work De Orbe Novo (1516), famously noting that the King "prefers" the pineapple "to all others", giving it the official approval of the monarchy and launching the centuries-long obsession with the fruit.

It is unknown when the first pineapple appeared in England, but it has been claimed that Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) received one as a gift in 1657. It is believed with certainty that the court of Charles II of England (1630–1685) first served and ate a pineapple during a dinner reception for the French ambassador in 1668, and this was attested to in some detail by diarist and gardener John Evelyn (1620–1706).

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  Oviedo published the first known drawing of a pineapple in La Natural hystoria de las Indias (1526)
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  Galleon tapestry depicting pineapples. Alcazar Palace, Seville, Spain.

Horticultural technology

Dutch innovation

The technology, methods, and techniques needed for tropical pineapple cultivation in a cold climate like Europe depended on separate innovations in what over time later contributed to the development of the modern conservatory: improvements in glass pane production to capture more light, temperature regulation with the use of early alcohol thermometers, the development of pineapple pits (also known as pineries), hothouses with stoves, and the use of tanner's bark to heat the bottom of the plants. Many of these developments are attributed to various people, although Dutch cloth merchant Pieter de la Court van der Voort (1664-1739), was one of the first to experiment with them in whole or in part in his garden at Allmansgeest (later renamed Berbice) in South Holland. His father, Pieter de la Court, was credited with growing one of the first pineapples in 1658, but this is dismissed by some experts as a legend. The younger De la Court's methods and techniques did not develop in a vacuum. Dutch botanist and physician Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738) was a friend and neighbor of De la Court, and it is thought that their shared interest in experimental glasshouses, stove design and temperature control directly influenced each other. Although De la Court widely shared his ideas with visitors and those in his close network, they would remain private until he finally published them in Bijzondere aenmerkingen, or Special Remarks (1737), two years before his death.

Unheated greenhouses, like those used in an orangery, first emerged in Italian Renaissance gardens in the late 15th century, leading to its culmination in the largest of its kind at the time at the Versailles Orangerie in France. The system was designed to allow the fruit trees to be moved around in boxes, surviving in shelters during the winter with nearby fires for heat. By the mid-17th century, such systems used iron stoves fueled by coal and charcoal, but the fumes could be deadly to the plants. Temperature regulation would have to wait until 1714, with the invention of a reliable thermometer. English gardener and founding Fellow of the Royal Society John Evelyn (1620–1706) helped contribute to the development of greenhouse heating technology with a unique design in 1664. The first stable hothouse was eventually built in 1682 for the Hortus Medicus in Amsterdam, using glass and heated by peat. It was followed by the Hortus Botanicus of Leiden in 1685 with some private estate gardens following the trend. This technology would later allow pineapple growers to maintain consistent greenhouse temperatures, but the details of how to control the temperature of the soil remained to be worked out until the early 18th century when the seldom known techniques of using tanners' bark and consistent temperature regulation with the use of thermometers became more widely known and shared.

Agneta Block and her garden Flora Batava at Vijverhof, by Jan Weenix. Pineapples appear on the left.

Amateur Dutch horticulturalist Agneta Block (1629–1704) established an experimental garden at Vijverhof, her country estate in Loenen, after becoming a widow at the age of 40. Between 1685 and 1687, she made a scientific breakthrough in cultivating and fruiting the first pineapple in Europe, a fleeting and difficult endeavor that had been tried for years by professionals without success. Her technique involved the use of viable cuttings, new hothouse technology known as a pineapple pit, and the planting of pineapple slips, shoots taken from the bottom of the plant. It is believed that Block's pineapple was originally derived from cuttings from the Hortus Botanicus in Leiden, which in turn had come from the Dutch colony of Surinam in 1680. Block's status as an amateur and private individual gave her an advantage, writes food historian Garritt van Dyk, as "royal gardeners and professional botanists were unable to achieve" her breakthrough. According to van Dyk, Block's success in propagating and fruiting the pineapple for the first time was due to "the lack of institutional hierarchy and procedure" at her home at Vijverhof. This advantage, writes van Dyk, "allowed for greater freedom in methodology and experimentation outside the boundaries of accepted academic protocols and the exigencies of commercial viability".

Around 1714, Henry Telende, a Dutch gardener employed by Matthew Decker, a Dutch-born English merchant, economist, and politician, made a breakthrough in English efforts to cultivate the pineapple. Telende relied on the techniques of Pieter de la Court, building a large hothouse system that could produce more pineapples than ever before. Telende's system was fairly robust and reliable, dependent on planting slips or fruit crowns in containers in a hotbed with equal parts manure and tanner's bark to keep the bottom of the plant consistently warm. The plants would sit under a glass, lean-to greenhouse that provided the maximum amount of light until the winter, when they were then moved to a hothouse, then back again to a hotbed after the end of the winter season. Telende also made use of alcohol thermometers which helped to carefully control the climatic conditions for the very first time. Writer Richard Bradley, who had spent time in Amsterdam, would popularize Telende's technique to the horticultural community in A General Treatise of Husbandry and Gardening (1721), leading to what became known as pineapple mania, an explosion in pineapple cultivation in Britain.

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  East Indian Market Stall (1640-1666)
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  Charles II Presented with a Pineapple (c.1675-80)
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  Pineapple grown in Sir Matthew Decker's garden at Richmond, Surrey (1720)

Hothouses

Pavlovsk Palace

Others

• St Mary's Gardens

Competition and rivalry

Münchhausen

Decades before he was executed during the French Revolution, conservative French journalist Simon-Nicholas Henri Linguet (1736–1794) called for the proposed cultivation of pineapple in France in the 1770s.

Culture

Cuisine

By the late 18th century, both George Washington (1732–1799) and Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) were known to enjoy pineapple in the elite, English country home tradition. Washington ordered large quantities of pineapples from the West Indies, while Jefferson was known to prefer pineapple pudding at desert.

Decorative arts

By the mid-18th century, the popularity of decorative pineapple tableware had reached the American colonies, some of which were imported from Britain and Ireland. Just before the American revolution, between 1750 and 1775, silver coffeepots and teapots in the colonies displayed the British fashion for lids topped by pineapples. Furniture design in the newly formed United States began to branch off from its European progenitors in the 1820s, but continued to incorporate carved pineapple ornamental motifs in the neoclassical style. Needlework in 19th century America began to make use of pineapple crochet and lace designs, becoming one of the most popular motifs of the time in the textile arts.

Architecture

The pineapple's association with the social class of nobility led to its widespread adoption as an architectural motif. In colonial America, pineapple architecturral motifs are found as early as the 1730s, but may have become even more popular with the rise of Colonial Revival architecture in New England more than a century later in the 1870s.

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  The finial pineapple on St Paul's Cathedral
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  Pineapples atop the Church of St. John the Evangelist

Notes and references

Notes

References

Bibliography

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