Gardens of New Spain: How Mediterranean Plants and Foods Changed America Book

Gardens of New Spain tells of Spanish connections to America during colonial times, relating the story of how Old World cultivated plants, gardens, agriculture, and cuisine made their way from pre-Columbian Spain to the colonial frontier of North America - a frontier that became the wellspring for many crops and foods we take for granted today. In depicting those earliest plantways that so shaped modern gardening, farming, and eating, Gardens of New Spain is the first book ever to cover this broad topic in any kind of depth. Late fifteenth century Spain is portrayed as an hourglass receptacle filled with plants and their foods that had funneled to the peninsula over the millennia from divers regions of the Old World - especially the Fertile Crescent, Asia, and Africa. When the new crops, livestock, and agricultural technology were introduced overseas to peoples who had independently evolved very different growing and eating scenarios, Columbus and his followers ushered in the grandest blending in history of international cuisines. From the Caribbean Islands the plantway is traced to the continent, then up the four corridors leading from Mexico to the heartland of North America. The first of these brought colonists and their carts loaded with seeds, cuttings, and garden tools to the region of present-day Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1598. Soon, Pueblo Indians, alongside missionaries and colonists, were supplementing their own corn, beans, and squash with the new European crops. A century later Padre Kino ushered a progression of Jesuit missions and mission gardens up the western corridor through Sonora and into present-day Arizona. Then Franciscan missionaries penetrated Texas, establishing a stronghold of missions around San Antonio where fields and gardens of wheat, melons, grapes, vegetables, and every kind of Mediterranean fruit flourished alongside the world's first full-fledged cattle ranches which, too, were indirect contributions from Spain. Finally, California was settled, again with Spanish missionaries and their gardens at the fore. Although the book also touches on the early Spanish agricultural influence in Florida, the focus is on the Greater Southwest. A final chapter personalizes two Hispanic families in New Mexico who continue to garden with traditional crops and traditional approaches to farming. Gardens of New Spain, though grounded in scholarly research and presenting ideas and factual matter new and useful to academicians, is written for the reading public interested in connecting contemporary gardens and everydays foods with their colonial Hispanic origins. The concise, flowing, sometimes witty, sometimes charming prose that often evokes vivid images of our agricultural and gastronomic past translates into a "good read".Read More