Vaccinium corymbosum
Origin: Whitesbog, New Jersey
Improvement status: Breeding population
Seeds per packet: ~30
BOTANICAL SAMPLE - NOT GERMINATION TESTED
Life cycle: Perennial
Nate Kleinman here — EFN co-founder, unrepentant plant nerd, and proud New Jersey resident since 2013 — writing in the first person, because some seed stories can only be told in the first person.
The seeds we're offering here for the first time are about as cool as any we've ever offered before. Frankly, I can't believe it took me a decade in the seed industry to realize this had to be done. For anyone who knows the significance of the following sentence, you probably don't even need to read anything else: These are seeds from over 100 selected highbush blueberry plants still growing at Elizabeth Coleman White's "Triangle Field" at Whitesbog, New Jersey. For everyone else, please read on...
Few stories in the history of agriculture are as fascinating or inspiring as the story of the domestication of the blueberry — and especially the pivotal role of a 3rd-generation cranberry farming Quaker by the name of Elizabeth Coleman White.
Ms. White was born in 1871 at her family's isolated cranberry farm known as Whitesbog in rural Pemberton Township, Burlington County, located in southern New Jersey's Pine Barrens, a million-acre ecosystem typified by bogs, winding rivers, and huge expanses of pitch pine forest with an understory of acid-loving shrubs like mountain laurel, azaleas, and blueberries, where cranberries, pitcher plants, and sphagnum moss thrive along the edges of most every tea-colored body of water and old-timers tell tales of bootlegging, moonshining, and the Jersey Devil. Elizabeth White's grandfather Barclay White, who had served as President Ulysses S. Grant's Superintendent of Indian Affairs, is said to have been the first New Jersey farmer to plant extensive acreage in cranberries back in 1851 (previously they were only ever harvested from the wild).
By the time young Elizabeth Coleman White came of age, her father Joseph Josiah White ran the farm. At age 16, Elizabeth was already helping to supervise cranberry pickers working for the family business. She continued her formal education during winters at Philadelphia's Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry (now Drexel University), but always returned to the farm and eventually came to manage it alongside her father. It wasn't until 1910, when she was nearly forty years old, that her story intersected with the story of one Frederick Vernon Coville, a career botanist with the US Department of Agriculture, based in Washington, DC, in a correspondence that changed both of their lives and eventually changed the world.
Fred Coville was born in Preston, New York, in 1867. He graduated from Cornell University twenty years later, in 1887, and went to work for the USDA as an assistant botanist the following year. He made his name as a participant in the 1891 Death Valley Expedition led by C. Hart Merriam and T.S. Palmer, particularly following the publication of his first book, Botany of the Death Valley Expedition, in 1893. He was deeply interested in desert plants and medicinal plants, leading him to spend a great deal of time with Indigenous peoples in western North America and to the publication of his 1897-1898 Medicinal Plants Survey. He was considered an expert in the plant families Juncaceae (rushes) and Grossulariaceae (currants and gooseberries), but by the early 1900s he turned his attention to blueberries.
The paper records of Coville's blueberry work from just three years (1907-1909) can still be found at the National Agricultural Library — and they fill some fifty boxes! During this period, he learned more about blueberries than perhaps anyone ever had before him, so in 1910 he published a groundbreaking pamphlet entitled Experiments in Blueberry Culture, in which he detailed many previously unknown or little-known facts about blueberries (including that they only thrive in acidic soil, require cross-pollination to bear well, benefit from a fungus in their roots that helps them take up nitrogen, and have chilling requirements to flower and fruit). Not long after its publication, Coville received a letter from Elizabeth Coleman White, who had just finished reading his new work, inviting him to come visit her family's farm in New Jersey and explore a possible collaboration.
The following year, 1911, Coville took White up on her offer and visited Whitesbog of the first of many times. Elizabeth White had long enjoyed eating the wild blueberries that surrounded her family's cranberry bogs and had already been trying to convince her father to let her create a blueberry business that would have its peak harvest season well before cranberry season, creating more work for their pickers and more steady income for the farm. With Coville in the picture, Josiah White agreed to devote land, money, and labor to make his daughter's dream a reality, so very quickly Ms. White was able to offer Mr. Coville an ideal location for a new experiment station for blueberry improvement as well as a ready supply of staggering blueberry diversity from the surrounding Pinelands.
Elizabeth Coleman White proved to be more than just an interested collaborator. If anything, it seems clear from the historical record that she was as much a driver as Coville of their innovative breeding program, if not its primary driver. Knowing that she was only an expert in her family's small patch of ground, she came to rely on her "Piney" neighbors — often poor, marginalized, hardscrabble people, some with Indigenous heritage, who survived their harsh and little-developed environment as hunters, trappers, fishers, sphagnum moss collectors, moonshiners, etc. — to find her the best wild blueberry plants as the basis for the breeding program. Initially, she offered one to three dollars (equivalent to $33 to $100 dollars today) for every bush found with berries measuring at least 5/8ths of an inch in diameter. She also promised to name any bush worthy of mass propagation after the person who found it.
In the off-season, she hired workers to dig up bushes that she'd previously flagged. Soon they brought some 120 wild bushes back to Whitesbog. The best of the bunch, a high-yielding plant with small to medium-sized sweet-tart berries, had been found by a man named Rube Leek. "Rube," White later commented, was "a poor name for an aristocratic bush," and "Leek" was little better, as it "savored of onions." So Coville came up with 'Rubel', and they introduced their new "cultivar" — fresh out of the wilds of the Pines — in 1912. Amazingly, it remains one of the most popular blueberry varieties to this day, considered exceptionally good for pies and preserves.
But White and Coville were not content to rest on their laurels. Over the next few years, they conducted hundreds of controlled crosses, and starting around 1916 began filling a triangular patch of ground at Whitesbog (the aforementioned "Triangle Field") with their most promising wildlings and seedlings. They also distributed plant material to other growers around the country and continued seeking extraordinary wild blueberry plants themselves. In the July 4th, 1919, edition of the journal Science, for instance, White placed an ad "offering $50.00 apiece for wild blueberry bushes bearing berries as large as a cent [3/4 of an inch]," while also noting that "two such plants" had already been found in New Jersey, and that in addition to growing them for her own commercial purposes, she will "furnish cuttings of them to Mr. Frederick V. Coville, of the United States Department of Agriculture, for use in his blueberry breeding experiments." Ultimately, Coville would produce some 100,000 blueberry seedlings, primarily through his collaboration with White. As recently as 1990, according to blueberry expert James F. Hancock, 75% of the blueberry acreage in the US was still planted in Coville hybrids.
The blueberry industry itself was born out of Elizabeth Coleman White's work. In addition to her role in selection, breeding, and propagation, White was an accomplished marketer as well. She helped organize the first blueberry growers' cooperative (the New Jersey Blueberry Cooperative Association), and after seeing some fancy candies wrapped in cellophane, contacted the cellophane supplier and began wrapping her blueberries in the clear plastic film. According to the Saturday Evening Post, this earned her "a peculiarly American brand of fame as the first person to offer fruit glorified—and better kept—under a wrap of sparkling Cellophane." She was also quoted as saying, "The 'window' idea created quite a stir in the markets... but nothing as compared to the excitement that prevailed when our first crop of specially bred and cultivated berries went to market in 1916." (I love how straightforward she was about discussing her own success. She knew, better than anyone else in fact, that she had done something very special with her life's work.)
White and Coville maintained a friendship and professional partnership for more than two decades, until Coville's death at the age of 69 in 1937, by which point he had become chairman of the National Geographic Society's Research Committee and founder of the National Arboretum. White continued working with blueberries, cranberries, as well as other Pine Barrens plants (including American holly, Pine Barrens gentian, and various ferns), and she kept up her leadership in the Blueberry cooperative and the American Cranberry Association too. A 1942 feature in the Saturday Evening Post declared her the "Blueberry Queen."
So that goes a long way toward explaining why I'm so excited about the seeds we're offering here. After many years of visiting Whitesbog (now a historic site preserving the small company-town that sprang up around the farm) and occasionally sampling blueberries from the legendary Triangle Field, it finally occurred to me to do a major harvest from the best plants and make the seeds available through EFN. I visited Whitesbog and harvested these seeds on July 19th, 2024. I got fruit from at least a hundred plants, including some berries that were already shriveled up and others that were barely ripe yet. That means these seeds have little to no late-ripening genetics (for that you'll have to purchase some of the 'Elliott' blueberry seeds we're also offering, which ripen in September and October, and also contain a great deal of White-Coville genetics, including a hefty dose of 'Rubel'). The berries were kept at room temperature for days and then in the fridge for months before processing to allow the seeds inside to fully mature. I tasted every bush before harvesting any fruit, and passed by a fair number that weren't very good in my estimation. Most were wonderful, and they represented a shockingly wide range of tastes, sizes, and textures, with some tasting almost like citrus fruit or raspberries, others having distinct vanilla or clove or cinnamon notes, and still others tasting like an already-baked blueberry pie or blueberry jam. I left feeling inspired by the possibilities yet to be realized in blueberry breeding — especially in the face of a changing climate that promises to change when, where, and how every single crop on which we rely is grown. I ultimately ended up with between 8 and 10 pounds of fruit — as shown here, one full Phillies stadium popcorn bucket's worth! — which yielded the thousands and thousands of seeds we have on offer today. Each and every seed that grows will become an entirely unique blueberry variety, never before known and never to be tasted again unless you continue to propagate it.
I'm sure very few of you have ever considered growing blueberries from seed, but I'm hopeful that after reading this account and seeing just a fraction of the Triangle Field's diversity in the attached photos, you'll decide to follow in Elizabeth Coleman White and Frederick Coville's sandy footsteps and take up highbush blueberry breeding for yourselves!
All of the photos here were taken the day I harvested these seeds. I'm so grateful to the members of The Pinelands Antique Engine Association who began restoring the Triangle Field in 2004 and continue to maintain it, as well as the Whitesbog Preservation Trust, caretaker of the whole historic village, whose executive director Allison Pierson has graciously blessed my plan to sell these seeds. We plan to donate 10% of the packet price of every packet sold to the Whitesbog Preservation Trust, along with a good supply of these seed packets for them to sell or give away in the gift shop.
GROWING TIPS: Blueberry seeds are most likely to sprout following 60-90 days of cold-moist stratification. We also recommend soaking the seeds for thirty minutes before beginning the stratification process. Use damp sand and/or peat moss. Plant seeds immediately after removing from the refrigerator and keep very well watered. Blueberries need acidic soil and lots of water to thrive.
