Algeria

Vavilov visited Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia before going to Syria and Palestine. Collecting in North Africa was an important part of his grand plan to understand the domestication of crops, and to obtain material with which to improve Soviet agriculture.

12 July
1926

From Marseilles it is just about an 8-hour voyage aboard a fast steamer to the port of Algiers. So this is Africa. However, the first impression is that there is very little of the real Africa left here. All around and wherever you look in Algeria there is an exclusively international flora: beautiful Peruvian philodendron [Monstera sp.] with split leaves; enormous thickets of Australian eucalyptus, acacias and casuarinas; citrus trees introduced from south-eastern Asia; Mexican cacti and agaves planted as fences along the shores; and endless vineyards, stretching for miles in all directions. This is what characterizes the present agriculture of Algeria.

I went to see the main ‘culprit’ for this, the famous French introducer of plants Louis Trabut. This was during the summer of 1926. On the day of my arrival the Algerian community was celebrating the occasion of Trabut’s 75th birthday and a bronze medal was issued in his honour. ^[1] Trabut had studied the flora of Algeria untiringly for more than 40 years and together with Batande, ^[2] he compiled the first catalogue of it; he also studied the evolution of the cultivated flora of Algeria. Trabut was the first one to understand the connection between the cultivated Mediterranean oats, Avena byzantina C. Koch, and wild oat-grass, A. sterilis L.; and he found the wild ancestor of horse beans in the mountain areas of Algeria, the so-called Vicia pliniana [Trabut] Muratowa. However, the most important matter in the life of Trabut, his greatest feat, was his wide-ranging scientific plan for introduction of everything of value within the plant kingdom from all countries with tropical or subtropical climates.

In contrast to American introducers, Trabut, a very well-educated taxonomist, phytogeographer and evolutionist, delved deeply into the selection of species and genera. His most beautiful monographs are studies of the evolution of the eucalyptus, acacias and agaves. He applied the wide horizon of a phytogeographer to the selection of citrus species. He created an important botanical garden, ^[3] where a worldwide tropical and subtropical flora is concentrated. There he gathered what was most valuable. Most of all this was subject to evolutionary and ecological ideas. The fame of Trabut is immortal. His methods are used not only in different countries along the shores of the Mediterranean; they are also employed in the subtropical areas of the Soviet Union.

Notes:

1. Something is amiss here. All the sources I have been able to find agree that Trabut was born in 1853, and many give July 12 as the day. That would make him 73, rather than 75, in July 1926, when Vavilov arrived. Would they have struck a medal for a man’s 73rd birthday, no matter how prominent? [↩]
2. Actually J.A. Battandier; the Flora can be seen thanks to the Biodiversity Heritage Library. [↩]
3. The Jardin d’Essai du Hamma, which reopened in May 2009 after restoration work. Photo from the Getty Research Institute, via Flickr. [↩]