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The Imperiia Project: a spatial history of the Russian Empire

Forest Beauty (pear variety)

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Contents of this tag:
1. Sary Sinop apple Botanical lithograph of a variety that likely originated in the southern coast of the Black Sea and thrived in Crimea. With the Saint Germaine pear the "alpha and omega" of Crimean orchardry. The Sary Sinop is considered a first-class market fruit, appealing for eating and cooking. Candied fruit factories use it exclusively. Yield is high, which explains why it plays a crucial role in the Crimean economy despite fetching 1 ruble 50 kopeks per pood (half the price of many reinette varieties). This is the calling-card apple of Karasubazar.
2. Winter Master pear A tree identified in Belgium in the second half of the 18th century. In the right circumstances (warm and sheltered locations), this pear is delicious; but less than ideal conditions yield pears for cooking. Crimean gardeners complain that the Winter Master requires too much moisture and protection. The fruit fall easily in the wind - a problem in Crimea. The editor writes that whenever one sees gorgeous Winter Masters on the table you can be sure they are from France. Russian-grown Winter Masters are few in number. Yet a correspondent writes from St. Petersburg to point out that in general, Crimean pears increasingly compete with French pears and their progress is such that the latter "might soon be a memory."
3. Saint Germaine pear The Saint Germaine (Сен Жермен) originated near Paris and enjoys renown throughout Europe. The Sary Sinap and Saint Germaine "are the alpha and omega of Crimean orchardry" and there isn't a garden in Crimean where the Saint Germaine does not grow. It fetches anywhere from 2 rubles 50 kopeks to 4 rubles per pood. Moscow fruit sellers reported that the highest quality fruit came from Alushta and Kuru Uzen, Karasubazar and Bahcesaray.
4. Duchesse d'Angouleme pear
5. Williams pear
7. Prunus avium: four varieties
8. Golden Winter Pearmain apple An English pear identified in 1800. At an 1894 international exposition there were 33 Golden Winter Pearmain entries, including from the western provinces, the Baltics, Crimea, Kherson, Yekaterinoslav, Poltava, Tersk and Kuban. The fruit ripens in October. This is a case of beauty over longevity though, thus the Golden Winter is best dried or made into cider. Atlas correspondents wrote in to add that the Golden Winter Pearmain stood up well to rain but could fall victim to moths and geese.
9. Bere Dil pear
11. Renet Champagne apple
12. Ardanpon apple The Ardanpon (Hardenpott) was identified in 1750. In the late 19th century it was well-established in Crimea and the most profitable (and tasty) of all winter pears. In Crimea it was known as the Ferdinand, and was often sent to the Moscow markets from the Kacha valley and from Alushta and Kuru Uzen. (St. Petersburg markets sold French pears.) This chromolithograph is based on a pear sent for the purposes of the Atlas in 1896 from Alushta. It weighed 422 grams.
13. Bere Bosc pear
14. Triumf Zhoduan pear
15. Krasotsvet apple
17. Canadian Renet apple
18. Abrikos Breda, Abrikos Lyuize (apricot)
19. Gros Noir (cherry)
20. Green Reine Claude (plum)

This page is referenced by:

The Glorious (Fruit Tree) Glossary 79 plain 20012 2022-07-01T18:04:34-04:00
This glossary complements the "Gardens of Crimea" dataset.
First, a bit of groundwork.
Trees are always in conversation with one another. We cannot know what the trees classified in the 1793 registers were saying (did they bicker? recite poetry?), how tall they were, or what they smelled like, but we know an astonishing amount about gardens that existed more than two hundred years ago. We know, for example, that they tended to be very small: most were less than a quarter of an acre. In fact, of the 732 plots for which we have information, the smallest was one-thousandth of an acre - a space that somehow managed to be big enough to host a fig, a walnut, two pears, and a mulberry tree.

We also know that on average the gardens contained 28 trees (with counts ranging from 1 to 673). And because three of the registers recorded both the quantity and type of trees present in each garden (well, to be more precise, they recorded the quantity and type of fruit trees) we can piece together a tree-scape of 15,742 plants.

The classification scheme at work in the registers is reproduced in this glossary. It contains 16 types of fruit tree, plus juniper and elm. (The latter were recorded only at one garden at Sudak.) To give the entries depth, we have drawn on the work of Karl Gablits (1752-1821), a naturalist and geographer whose Physical description of Tavrida Province (1785) revealed the botanical world of Crimea to curious audiences in Russia and throughout Europe. To what extent do these sources complement one another? Consider this:
- Gablits' study came on the heels of annexation (1783); the garden registers were compiled a decade later (1793).
- Gablits' work was designed to make the Crimean tree-scape recognizable to the reading public (and in particular to members of the European scientific community); the registers were designed to secure property claims and profits for the imperial government.
- Gablits' work is qualitative and textual; the registers are tabular and quantitative.
Finally, in order to bring the colors and textures of orchard fruit into sharp relief, the glossary includes botanical illustrations. They are sourced, whenever possible, from the Атлас плодов (Atlas of Fruits) - a collection of chromolithograph illustrations of plant varieties published by the Imperial Russian Society of Fruit Cultivators in 1906.
Now, the Good Stuff.
The Glossary includes all 16 fruit-bearing trees named in the registers, plus 5 included by Gablits but not represented in the registers. Clicking a tree name will open a page with the following information:
- English, Russian, and Latin terms for each tree;
- The prevalence of the variety (%) among the total tree population recorded in the registers (if applicable);
- The occurrence rate (a measure of the percentage of gardens in which the variety grew) (if applicable);
- Notes from the dataset on the relevance of the tree type (if applicable);
- Fun notes from Gablits;
- A botanical illustration;
- A map of the settlements with which the gardens were associated (if applicable).
Click on any red dot to see which villages contained gardens with that tree type. If you would like to see which other tree types were found at the same location, click the name of the village that interests you. Drag the dots around as much as you like to reveal connections, and simply click any dot again to "close" it. You can "open" as many dots as you like. We highly recommend using the full-screen function (see the button in the lower right). Alternately, scroll down to "Contents" and click any tree name to begin exploring.