Chapter 4 - Grafting Glory

Summary

This chapter focuses on grafting of fruit trees and the development of new cultivars of fruits, exploring the ways in which grafting came to occupy a prominent metaphorical and symbolic place in elite intellectual discourse. It is argued that such ideological constructs ultimately rested on the fact that grafting is a fundamental technique in arboriculture (since propagation of plants to maintain them true to type occurs by grafting). Grafting lent itself easily to be used as the symbol of the ingenuity and control humans could exercise over nature, but also as a possible source of hubris. The emphasis literary texts give to the involvement of prominent Roman families in the development and naming of new fruit varieties suggests that this symbolic discourse was rooted in practical considerations about the economic implications of running agricultural estates for market-oriented arboriculture.