Flora Unveiled

362 i Flora Unveiled

[T] he Carnation and the Sweet William are in some respects alike; the Farina of the

one will impregnate the other, and the Seed so enliven’d will produce a Plant different

from either, as may now be seen in the garden of Mr. Thomas Fairchild of Hoxton, a

Plant neither Sweet William nor Carnation, but resembling both equally, which was

raised from the Seed of a Carnation that had been impregnated with the Farina of the

Sweet William.^31

Although Bradley never actually states that Fairchild made the hybrid himself, he identi-
fies sweet William as the pollen donor, a fact that could only be known if the hybrid was
produced by hand.
Three years later, Patrick Blair, a physician, amateur botanist, and Fellow of the Royal
Society, described Fairchild’s hybrid again in a presentation to the Royal Society. In a report
appearing in the Minutes of the Royal Society of 1720, Blair states unequivocally, and con-
trary to Bradley’s account, that the hybrid was generated spontaneously and that Fairchild
discovered it by chance:

The other Experiment was made by Mr. Fairchild some years ago. He found a plant

in his garden of a middle nature between a Sweet William & Carnation July flower

(a specimen of which was produced before the Society) it grew in a bed where the seed

of each of those flowers had by accident been thrown promiscuously, & he takes it to

be an heterogeneous production from these two different flowers ... these new sort of

plants produce no seed, but are barren like the Mule or other Mongrel animals which

are generated from different species.^32

Blair’s account seems the more credible of the two, given that Fairchild himself
was present at the proceedings and even passed around a pressed specimen of his
“Mule” to the assembled Fellows. On the other hand, Blair used the term “experi-
ment,” which implies a deliberate action rather than an accidental find. Assuming
Fairchild created the hybrid himself, why would he allow Blair to characterize it as
an accidental find?
One possible explanation for the discrepancy between Bradley’s and Blair’s accounts
was proposed by Michael Leapman. Noting the prevailing religious prejudice against
hybridization, Leapman speculated that Fairchild “may have asked Blair to let the gran-
dees of the Royal Society believe that his discovery had been by chance rather than by
desig n.”^33
Assuming Fairchild did, in fact, create his “Mule,” it was probably not an isolated inci-
dent. According to Zirkle, five years later, Fairchild wrote in The City Gardener that he
was continuing his researches on “the generation of plants,” a euphemism often applied to
hybridization at that time. But if Fairchild succeeded in making any other hybrid varieties,
neither he nor his friends ever recorded them for posterity.

Her maphroditic Flowers and Bee Pollination

All of Camerarius’s experiments had been carried out with dioecious and monoecious
species in which the two sexes are on separate flowers. Richard Bradley seems to have