Sunday, April 17, 2005
The fruit fell a long way from this tree
By GORDON DILLOW The Orange County Register
I know she was only a tree, and maybe it's silly to get too sentimental about her. Still, given her strange and wonderful history, and the almost daily connection she still has to many of us, it was hard to see her reduced to a stump.
The tree was the Hass avocado "Mother Tree," the genetic source of every Hass avocado in the world. And chances are whenever you dip a tortilla chip into a bowl of guacamole, you're eating a piece of her.
Start the story in 1926, when a man named Rudolph Hass planted a Guatemalan avocado seedling on a 2-acre parcel he owned in La Habra Heights. The seedling was a hybrid of unknown descent, and Hass wasn't interested in its fruit. Instead he planned to use the tree as "root stock" - that is, to graft buds on it from more desirable types of avocado, such as the Fuerte.
By the way, Hass' name, and the avocado that bears it, is properly pronounced to rhyme with "pass," "lass" and "mass." True, a lot of people say "Hah-ss," and some supermarket produce managers even spell it as "Haas" on the avocado bins. I guess they think it sounds tonier and more upscale. But Rudolph's son Charles Hass has assured me that it's Hass-rhymes- with-pass.
Anyway, Hass tried three times to graft some Fuerte avocado buds on the root-stock tree, but they wouldn't take. He thought about cutting down the uncooperative tree, but by then he had moved to Pasadena to be a postman, so he let it grow - and by the early 1930s it was producing its own fruit.
Problem was, the avocados from the root-stock tree were ugly, with a thick, bumpy, purple-black skin and a strange shape, not at all like the smooth, thin-skinned green Fuertes. They didn't look like anything anyone would ever want to eat.
Who actually first ate one is a subject of debate. The late Joseph E. Upton of La Habra, who lived on the Hass place for a while, told me years ago that he had tried the tree's avocados, found them to be delicious and brought them to Mr. Hass' attention. Charles Hass recalls that it was his older brothers who first tried them and then got their father to spare the tree.
However it happened, Rudolph Hass realized he had a good thing on his hands. Outwardly ugly as they were, on the inside the avocados were creamy and nutty-tasting, with an oil content of 18 percent. In 1935 Hass took out a patent on what he called a "new and improved variety of avocado," and made a deal with H.H. Brokaw, a Whittier nurseryman, to sell buds from the tree to be grafted onto other root-stock trees. The avocados thus produced would be exact genetic replicas of the avocados from Hass' tree.
But it was hard overcoming resistance to the Hass avocados' outside appearance. It wasn't until the 1960s that the Hass avocado really took off, and by then both Mr. Hass and his patent had long since expired. Charles Hass says his dad made less than $5,000 on the Hass avocado.
Today, of course, such a patent would be worth millions. According to Wayne Brydon of the California Avocado Society, almost all avocados now grown commercially in the U.S. are Hass avocados, which are favored for their tough skins - which increases shelf life - and for the trees' long maturity and high yields.
He estimates there are 5.5 million commercial Hass avocado trees in California, and perhaps 30 million worldwide - and every one of the avocados from them is the genetic offspring of that lone tree in La Habra Heights.
As for the Mother Tree herself, she grew to a height of about 50 feet and annually yielded about 500 pounds of avocados. In the early 1970s a house was built on the property on West Road, but DeWitt Etheridge and his late wife, Joan, who lived in the house for years, graciously allowed visitors to come into their front yard to see the Mother Tree and the bronze plaque placed beneath it by the California Avocado Society and the La Habra Historical Society.
Now all that's left is the plaque. The Mother Tree had started suffering from root rot, and despite efforts to save her, in 2002, at the age of 76, the Mother Tree died and had to be cut down.
"I miss it," DeWitt Etheridge, who's now 80, told me when I stopped by the other day. "That was a good tree."
Hank Brokaw, the nephew of H.H., has the wood from the Mother Tree at his nursery in Saticoy, and has been using it to make commemorative gavels and wooden plaques for avocado aficionados and various historical groups. Some of the wood also went to Rudolph Hass' descendants.
And that's the story of the Hass Mother Tree. She may be gone, but her 30 million direct descendants live on, still putting avocados on our tables. So even though she was just a tree, maybe it's only fitting that we remember her from time to time.
Say, for example, the next time we dip a chip in the guacamole.
