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Chief among Fairchild’s many horticultural achievements was his production of the first
known artificial plant hybrid by crossing the carnation (Dianthus caryophyllus) with a sweet
William (Dianthus barbatus).^26 This hybrid was propagated vegetatively for a hundred years
and was proudly grown in many gardens around London. In a letter dated July 22, 1740,
from botanist and Royal Society member Peter Collinson to the American botanist John
Bartram, Collinson describes Fairchild’s hybrid as follows:Where plants of a class are growing near together, they will mix and produce a mingled
species. An instance we have in our gardens, raised by the late Thomas Fairchild, who
had a plant from seed,^27 that was compounded of the Carnation and Sweet William.
It has the leaves of the first, and its flowers double like the Carnation— the size of a
Pink— but in clusters like the Sweet William. It is named a Mule— per analogy to the
Mule produced from the Horse and Ass.^28In the eighteenth century, tampering with nature by creating “Monsters” was still gener-
ally regarded as distasteful and unnatural, even blasphemous. In Shakespeare’s A Winter’s
Tale, written around 1610, Perdita expressed contempt for “streak’d gillyflowers,” which
she called “nature’s bastards” because she believed they were created illegitimately by the
gardener’s art, probably by grafting.^29 In Fairchild’s day, anyone attempting to create new
varieties by hybridization was widely perceived as meddling with the divine plan. Members
of polite society were already somewhat squeamish about biological conception in general.
In a dissertation on sexual reproduction in animals and plants published in 1743, Jacob
Andrew Trembley felt compelled to apologize abjectly for inflicting such a disgusting sub-
ject on his fastidious readers:We are wisely silent concerning the other circumstances of the formation of the fetus
of an animal or plant. Already we are trying imprudently to reveal the very lofty
and rather secret mysteries of nature; already, kindest readers, we have abused your
patience more than is fair; it is time that we put a stop for the sake of the disgusted
reader, for this reason at least, that we may repay your kindness by not abusing it any
further.^30That such attitudes were common in the eighteenth century— along with Fairchild’s
natural diffidence— may help to explain his seeming reluctance to bask in the full glory of
his “Mule” by describing the experiment in his own words. The only accounts we have of
the origin of Fairchild’s Mule are second- hand— the first by Richard Bradley in his book,
New Improvements in Planting and Gardening: Both Philosophical and Practical (1717/ 1718)
and the second by Patrick Blair in his Botanik Essays (1720). Curiously, the two accounts
differ on the question of the hybrid’s origin. In a passage describing the potential benefits
to agriculture of the practice of artificial pollination, Bradley, a prolific writer and Fellow
of the Royal Society who later became the first Professor of Botany at Cambridge, states
that “a curious person may by this Knowledge, produce such rare kinds of Plants as have
not yet been heard of, by making choice of two Plants for his Purpose, as near alike in their
Parts, but chiefly in their Flowers and Seed- Vessels.” He then goes on to cite the example of
Fairchild ’s Mule: