Origin Of Humble Potato Is Shrouded In Deep Mystery

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 14, Issue 85, 13 January 1950, Page 7

Origin Of Humble Potato Is Shrouded In Deep Mystery

Where the potato first came from is anybody’s guess. Spaniards discovered it under cultivation when they invaded South America in 1542. Sir Walter Raleigh has been credited with introducing it to England from Virginia, but so have Sir Francis Drake and Sir John Hawkins. Some say the first English crop was raised at Brixton, others that it was grown in a garden belonging to Lord Burleigh in the Strand.

At first it had a hostile reception in England, but Dr Parmentier tasted it in France and, pronouncing it good, popularised it, in spite of ridicule, by securing the interest of Louis XVI. Queen Marie Antoinette wore a wreath of potato flowers at ball and Parmentier was granted a plot in which to grow the plants and an armed guard to protect them. The greatest potato disaster in history happened in 1846 in Ireland, which had by this time adopted the potato as the country’s staple food. A potato blight destroyed the year’s crop in a few weeks. Of the eight million population, nearly a million died of hunger in five years and ten years after the famine one and a half million Irish had migrated. Thanks to the Rev. Chauncey Goodrich, who immediately set himself the task of finding a cure for blight, and to many an eminent agriculturist '‘.since then, such a disaster could not happen again.

Today over eight thousand varieties exist. The King Edward and Victoria are royal names given to this common but precious vegetable. Scotland has done most to develop this “Peruvian weed.” Plant breeders who cross-fertilise the flowers of different varieties have evolved yellow, red, blue and white potatoes from the mature potato “berry” thus created. Only a few are ever found worth widespread cultivation. But the search for increasingly hardy potatoes goes on.