pruning of tree branches competing for sunlight. Later, actual cultivation
appeared—transplantation and reseeding. Thus sunflowers became culti-
gens and spread eastward, becoming ubiquitous in the humid East long
before Europeans began to land on its coasts.^14 Tobacco and squashes were
manipulated in form and locale, apparently, in similar fashion. Likewise
wild grapes. The early Atlantic explorer Verrazzano observed encourage-
ment of these on the present-day Delmarva Peninsula, where ‘‘the bushes
around them are removed so that the fruit can ripen better.’’ Later-arriving
Europeans described arbors of grapes, representing a cultural stage ap-
proaching actual cultivation. William Bartram, traveling among the Creeks
in Alabama in , noticed not grape arbors but trees and shrubs ‘‘en-
tangled with Grape vines’’ all of the same species. When the fruit ripened,
Bartram wrote, ‘‘Indians gather great quantities of them, which they pre-
pare for keeping, by first sweating them on hurdles over a gentle fire, and
afterwards dry them on their bunches in the sun and air, and store them
up for provisions.’’^15 The Creeks made raisins, in other words.
Natives also commonly encouraged favored tree species by not burning
them for fields, by clearing competitors, and/or by pruning limbs so as to
produce less but larger fruit. One of de Soto’s chroniclers observed a large
grove of walnut trees in an open field in eastern Arkansas. Cherokees in
northern Georgia were all ‘‘nut growers,’’ according to a later witness. And
yet more Europeans recorded protected concentrations of plums, mulber-
ries, peaches, pears, and nectarines. Plums were apparently the basis for
‘‘bread’’ natives presented to de Soto and his men along the Mississippi,
and more than two centuries later, near the Tombigbee, Bartram remarked
upon the ‘‘chicasaw plum,’’ growing as a cultigen on abandoned large crop
fields.
Among dozens of species of trees that Indians managed, though, the yau-
pon (Ilex vomitoria) seems the most extraordinary and revealing of native
ingenuity. A scrubby evergreen native to sandy, salty South Atlantic shore-
lines, yaupon had become essential to coastal natives’ medicine and ritual
before the Spanish appeared in La Florida. Timucuans, the Guale, and other
shore folk boiled yaupon branch tips, blossoms, and tender leaves to make
a ‘‘black tea’’—an emetic taken regularly to purge bodily (and probably so-
cial) imbalances and disharmonies. Jacques le Moyne de Morgues painted
Timucuan men seated in a semicircle, women boiling water and diffusing
tea before them, and the men drinking and projectile-vomiting. Natives im-
bibed their black tea from beautifully incised conch shells, representing
the import of the substance and ritual. Two centuries later and hundreds of