It’s been a lousy growing season for Ken Taylor’s cantaloupes. The weather has been terrible — cool and wet, when it should have been hot and dry — and the leaves on the vines are browning and riddled with small holes from fungal disease.
Standing on his 70-acre organic farm on Île Perrot, about 30 miles west of Montreal, Taylor surveys the damage through a pair of thick-framed glasses. It’s late July, and there’s not much to see. Finally he spots a tiny cantaloupe. “This is basically what it looks like, off and on, all the way down: one fruit here and there.”
Those aren’t just any fruit. They’re specimens of the Montreal melon — a large and particularly hard-to-grow cantaloupe that Taylor saved from extinction. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Montreal melon was considered a delicacy. Sweet and juicy with hints of nutmeg, it has green flesh like a honeydew, but its exterior is netted, rather than smooth. According to Taylor, it’s probably Canada’s most famous heritage food.
“There wasn’t a Vancouver kiwi or a Halifax oyster,” he later said. “It was the Montreal melon!” While he acknowledges that other foods originated in Canada — the Laurentian turnip, for example — Taylor says nothing else had the melon’s renown.
“Russian caviar; champagne from Reims, France; and the Montreal melon — those were the three snob foods in the early 1900s,” Taylor says.
But when Taylor brought back the melon in the mid-'90s, hoping it could gain traction at that century’s end, too, he wasn’t motivated by nostalgia. He had something else in mind: that in a world where industrial farming has reduced us to eating a tiny fraction of the fruit and vegetable varieties we used to, genes from the past might be more important to our future than anyone realizes.
Ken Taylor is seen in his greenhouse, Nov. 4, 2015.
Arthur Gauthier for BuzzFeed News
The Montreal melon would have remained lost to history if not for a simple but gnawing question that popped into food journalist Barry Lazar’s mind in 1991. “I live on a street called Old Orchard,” he recalled, “and I started to think, Why is this street called Old Orchard?”
Lazar plunged into research mode. Orchards had once thrived on the west side of Montreal, and he learned that his neighborhood, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce (NDG), had been considered “the fruit basket of Quebec.” One fruit in particular kept coming up in his research: the Montreal melon. The melons, which took a whole summer to mature, were huge, often weighing between 15 and 20 pounds, about the size of a Butterball turkey. They were either pumpkin- or football-shaped, depending on the strain, and grown mostly by two prosperous NDG farming families, the Décaries and the Gormans.
Montreal’s soil was rich in minerals, and NDG, located near four racetracks, was rich in horse manure. “We used to get big steaming loads of horse manure, dig a deep trench, and plant the melons on top,” Fred Aubin, a then-71-year-old melon farmer’s son, told the botanical magazine Seeds of Diversity in 2000.
In addition to having ample natural fertilizer, the farmland where the melon thrived occupied the western slopes of Mount Royal, all the way down to the St. Lawrence River, where there was good sun exposure and protection from harsh northwest winds.
The Montreal melon in a Burpee's catalog, 1885.
Courtesy New York Public Library
After Burpee Seeds founder Washington Atlee Burpee encountered the melons at a Montreal market in August 1880, he introduced them to the rest of North America through his popular seed catalogue. Burpee’s catalogue described the melon as “remarkably thick ... melting, and of a delicious flavor” and touted it as the “best melon we’ve ever eaten.” Burpee even offered $50 cash prizes to whoever could grow the largest melons.
As word of the Montreal melon spread, demand grew. By the early 1900s, local farmers were sending regular shipments by train to New England and New York, where upscale restaurants and hotels put them on dessert menus and sold them for up to a dollar a slice — the equivalent of about $24 today. Because the melons were so large and thin-skinned, the flesh bruised easily. A woven-basket industry sprang up to protect them during transport, and they were packed in short, fine-stemmed hay.
The city took pride in its namesake fruit, and Lazar says that one was sent every year as a gift to the British throne. The Canadian Pacific Railway offered the melon in its formal dining cars, instructing staff to serve it “on cracked ice in a bread tray,” accompanied by a finger bowl.
Montreal’s famous crop was so profitable that at least one farmer hired an armed guard to protect his fields at night. By 1907 the melons could earn the farmers a couple thousand dollars per acre each season, around $49,000 in today’s dollars. In a 1908 report, the USDA took note of the “melon of unusual excellence,” its “fancy prices,” and the fact that “even at such prices, the Canadian growers are not able to supply the American demand.”
A menu from 1914 showing the Montreal melon.
Courtesy New York Public Library
American seed companies started growing their own varieties of the melon, giving them names like Mammoth Montreal, Montreal Market, and Perfect Montreal. According to William Woys Weaver, author of Heirloom Vegetable Gardening, the Montreal melon was more widely grown in New England, Canada, and the Upper Midwest than honeydew, cantaloupes, or any other muskmelon, “not only because of its large size but because it yielded the best-flavored melons for short-season gardens.”
But the melon’s heyday wouldn’t last. Like hundreds of fruit and vegetable varieties that thrived during the early 20th century, it didn’t survive the mid-century shift to industrial agriculture. It wasn’t an easy melon. It required a fair amount of coddling: watering, syringing, ventilating, lifting with a flat stone or shingle to prevent cracking or rot, and turning every few days to ensure uniformity of shape, color, netting, and ripening.
But perhaps its biggest enemy was urban development. Between 1914 and 1930, NDG’s population increased tenfold (from 5,000 to 50,000). Residential blocks, schools, and churches were built to accommodate the growth. Cars began replacing horses on the streets, and all but one of the racetracks gave way to development. Gone was the easy access to natural fertilizer for the melon fields, and the Montreal melon, Lazar says, “required a lot of fertilizer.”
The area’s urbanization continued through the postwar period, and the farmers eventually sold their melon land to developers. The Décaries sold off a large portion of theirs as early as 1923, for $275,000.
Over the next three decades, the melon quietly disappeared. By the early 1950s, Burpee’s seed catalog no longer offered its seeds. Today, the Décarie Expressway cuts across the land where the melons once grew.
Arthur Gauthier for BuzzFeed News
When Lazar wrote about the Montreal melon for the Montreal Gazette in 1991, the melon was long gone not only from the city’s soil, but also from its collective memory.
Montreal poet and author Mark Abley, who was then a Gazette reporter, was riveted by Lazar’s discovery. “I just thought, This is amazing,” recalls Abley, who says his passions include “knowing about weird biological, zoological facts and things.” He wondered how such a popular fruit could have disappeared so completely.
Abley had researched endangered species before. He knew about a stick insect, long thought to be extinct, that had been found clinging to a rock on an island in the South Pacific; a fish that had been known only from its fossil record until 1938, when it was dredged up in the Indian Ocean by an angler; and a bird that was thought to have vanished from Bermuda shortly after British sailors arrived in the 1600s but was rediscovered in 1951 and is now the country’s national bird. “There’s even a particular name for this,” he says. “Lazarus species.”
An 1887 ad for the Montreal melon.
It occurred to Abley that someone somewhere might have stored some of the Montreal melon seeds, and if so, then perhaps the melon could make a comeback. Saving the Montreal melon from extinction might have been a long shot, but Abley figured that if anyone could do it, it was Ken Taylor.
At the time, Taylor sold organic heirloom vegetables at his farm on Saturdays. Abley had shopped there on occasion and had been struck by the variety of items on display. He remembers being particularly impressed by the Cream of Saskatchewan melon, because he’d grown up in Saskatchewan and had never heard of it. It was obvious, says Abley, that Taylor had “an unusual interest in plants.”
Taylor is a rare breed: a farmer with a Ph.D. in chemistry. At 70, he’s well over 6 feet tall, with a prominent chin and white stubble. His land looks nothing like a typical farm — no wide-open fields or neat rows of crops. It’s chaotic, shady in parts and overgrown with tall weeds and wildflowers. The crops blend into their surroundings. They’re easy to miss.
Taylor bought the first acre of what he now calls Green Barn Farm in 1973. At the time, he’d just become a professor at John Abbott College in the West Island of Montreal — a job he’d go on to hold for 35 years, teaching chemistry, winemaking, and beekeeping until his retirement in 2005. He’d grown up on a farm in southeastern Quebec, and he missed growing his own food.
The land was all swamp and scrub weed, with a few open wells on it. A dilapidated barn more than a century old sat on the property and was used by the town’s mayor as a place to store his boats. Taylor planted hundreds of fruit and nut trees, and over the years he expanded his acreage, started one of Montreal’s first CSAs, and renovated the barn house, where he and his wife, Lorraine, held the Saturday market for more than two decades.
Ken Taylor at Green Barn Farm in Montreal.
Arthur Gauthier For Buzzfeed News
Taylor raised his four children at the farm and did what he could to keep them away from fast foods or foods with corn byproducts or foods imported from countries with different regulatory standards. To satisfy their desire for sweets, he baked them hemp cookies. “They were green,” recalls his son Nick.
Taylor has described himself as someone who never “fit the mold anywhere,” and he has unconventional ideas about food production. He’s eager to share them, and sometimes does so in ways that are pithy and provocative. (“Cantaloupes have killed more people than the Afghan war!”; “Monsanto probably controls your food supply!”; “Canada is a hotbed of planet disrespect!”)
But mostly he talks very seriously — and in painstaking detail — about agricultural problems and their solutions. Nick says a typical conversation with his dad while growing up meant patiently sitting through “fun fact 9,226 about why pears grow better here.” And while he found it hard to bear for the first 18 years of his life, his father’s passion for food production and sustainability eventually rubbed off on him. He now has his master’s degree in plant science, works closely with Taylor, and plans to someday take over for him at the farm.
Though Taylor took on farming simply because he wanted to grow his own food, it has evolved into a mission. He sells seeds, seedlings, and rootstock on the Green Barn Farm website, urging growers to “protect our Canadian genetic heritage.” He also partners with a Montreal CSA, Lufa Farms, to provide items for its food baskets; offers “eco-education” through workshops and seminars; and gives “Taste-n-Talk” tours of the farm.
Arthur Gauthier for BuzzFeed News
On the farm these days you can see wandering chickens, edible flowers, a grape vineyard, a pawpaw orchard, sunflowers, and tree after tree, some 60 feet tall. Depending on the season, they bear black walnuts, chestnuts, mulberries, apricots, plums, peaches, and highbush cranberries, along with more exotic offerings like quince. A shady dirt path leads to a three-acre plot where overgrown weeds obscure rows of low-lying vine crops like squashes and melons. Items you wouldn’t expect to find in a northern climate thrive on Taylor’s land: bananas, Asian pears, pecans, sumac. “There’s really nothing we can’t grow here,” he says.
Working with perennial plants, which require minimal upkeep and don’t need to be replanted every year, he has bred and selected varieties of fruits, nuts, and berries that resist the brutal Canadian winters. And he thinks other Canadian farmers ought to be doing the same.
“Planting seeds and pounding the soil and annually preparing it and fertilizing it and watering it and fighting whatever short-term disease you may have so that you can finish everything up in three months is not a very earth-friendly or sustainable food production system,” says Taylor. “But that’s basically all we do in Canada.”
Part of the problem, according to Taylor, is that the country’s agricultural system is designed for exports, not for local markets. In 2012, Canada became the world’s fifth-largest agricultural exporter — and spent $32.3 billion bringing in agricultural and agri-food items from 190 other countries.
“We’re a country of agriculture, but we can’t feed ourselves,” Taylor says. “That’s pathetic.”
The only hope for food security, according to Taylor, is to disrupt the monoculture of modern farming through small-scale diversity. Diversity is important in farming, because planting only one crop, or one variety of a crop, leaves it vulnerable to disease. The Irish Potato Famine is a case in point. The Cavendish banana, which makes up 99% of the banana export market, is being wiped out by a fungal disease for which there’s no cure, and the industry has no other banana variety on deck.
A newsletter from 2000 advertises a Montreal melon competition.
The Westmount Historian
As a food grower, Taylor sees it as his responsibility to restore to his little section of earth the genetic diversity that’s been lost from it. “This island used to be full of all kinds of variety of nuts and berries and wild stuff,” he says. “Well, that’s all gone. We’ve now got cornfields and soy fields and people, so there’s no natural mixing and changing of the genetics.” That’s important, he says, because “if you take a population and let them inbreed, eventually none of them are very strong.”
There’s also a critical need for diversity in how food is grown, he says. While CSAs like Lufa Farms — which grows food hydroponically in rooftop greenhouses year-round — are a step in the right direction, most innovation in farming is happening elsewhere in the world, Taylor says. He points to encouraging models such as the old London Underground bomb shelters that have been converted into subterranean food farms and rely on the Earth’s natural heat, and the food hubs in Vermont that aid sustainable local-food systems.
In Canada, only 1.8% of the farms are certified organic — and that certification doesn’t even mean much to Taylor. “Organic means you can spray with sulfur and do all these other things I don’t like,” he says, “and if you don’t have enough organic feed for your chickens, you’re allowed to buy non-organic. And if your product is 90% organic, the last 10% can be anything — you can put cyanide in it!”
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