HISTORY OF THE GARDEN PEA 



almost impossible to say what pea or pulse is meant. 

 Thus, a reference is found in the Old Testament to 

 pulse in which David in the desert is " brought beds, 

 and basins, and earthen vessels, and wheat, and barley, 

 and flour, and parched corn, and beans, and lentils, and 

 parched pulse." 1 But what pulse? Possibly a pea 

 since neither a bean nor a lentil, but what pea? Or, 

 was it a vetch or lupine? It is useless to speculate. 



Before going further it may be well to say a few 

 words about names of the peas. The early Greek writers 

 confused the pulses under the names orobos, erebin- 

 thos. and pisos, but Theophrastus is definite in the use 

 of these names: orobos is the vetch: erebinthos, the 

 chick-pea: and pisos is the common pea. Etymologists 

 connect pisos with the root pisere, to pound, to stamp. 

 By this name the pea is not, some say, described 

 as a product that should be ground or stamped; but, 

 rather, as a product of the operations named so 

 that the name pisos may have first been applied to 

 pebbles, gravel, or hailstones. Other etymologists 

 believe the word to have come from the name of the 

 operation and was given because only ripe seeds were 

 used and these were thrashed by stamping or flailing. 

 When the Greeks took the pea to Rome, pisos became 

 pisum, a name eventually passed on to the English as 

 peason, then pease or peasse; the English mistaking 

 these words for plurals dropped the " s " and pea 

 became the universal name among English-speaking 

 people for this vegetable. 



No botanist nor student of the early history of 

 plants seems to have thought there was any possibility 

 of the garden pea, nor any related peas, having come 

 from central or eastern Asia since wild prototypes are 

 not found in that vast region; and because Chinese 

 records very definitely place its entrance into China 

 at so late a date as the end of the Sixteenth Century 

 when it was known, and still is, as the Mohammedan 

 pea. Besides, that marvelous food-plant, the soy bean, 

 grows wild in many parts of eastern Asia and has been 

 cultivated in China and Japan from the remotest times 

 in these ancient countries, and has furnished fats, butter, 

 and cheese without costly and wasteful intervening 

 farm animals to the Orientals. 



That the garden pea and several related species of 

 pulses were cultivated by the early Greeks is certain 

 but it is now impossible to separate the pea from other 

 pulses in the writings of the Greeks since they seemed 

 to have used names interchangeably for peas, lentils, 

 chick-peas, lupines and vetches. Theophrastus, who 

 died 287 B.C., in his Enquiry into Plants, devotes 

 Chapter VIII to cereals and pulses in which the pea 

 appears in the list of pulses; directions are given for 

 sowing; we are told peas, beans, and chick-peas come up 

 with several leaves; the plant in leaf, stem, pod, and 

 seed is described; it is said that grubs occur in peas 

 whenever the crop gets too much rain and hot weather 

 supervenes; and much general information is given in 

 regard to the nature, uses, and culture of pulses. It is 



apparent from this discussion of peas by Theophrastus 

 that this vegetable had long been widely and commonly 

 grown in Greece both for human consumption and for 

 fodder, yet the plant is not described exactly enough 

 so that one may say whether this common pulse of the 

 Greeks was a field or a garden pea. Small matter — 

 even botanists in our own time confuse the two — and 

 it suffices to state with certainty that an edible pea was 

 cultivated by the most ancient Greeks who left records. 



To ascertain the origin of any cultivated plant in 

 Europe and to study its history, one turns at once to 

 Theophrastus, Father of Botany, and the author of the 

 oldest treatise on botany extant. But in making use of 

 Theophrastus, the reader must be reminded that the 

 old Greek must not be regarded as a Father of Gardening, 

 entitled though he is to paternity in botany, nor even 

 the distinction of being an early practitioner in growing 

 garden plants. Theophrastus wrote at a time when 

 gardening, farming, orcharding, and the cultivation of 

 flowers and medicinal plants were far advanced, when all 

 food plants derived from the Old World had been named, 

 domesticated, had their varieties and had been culti- 

 vated for many centuries. He was writing in an ad- 

 vanced stage of agriculture and civilization; quotes 

 other books about plants and had much of his informa- 

 tion from predecessors whom he looked upon as ancient 

 as we look upon him as belonging to an age long, long ago. 



We should expect, therefore, and do find that 

 Theophrastus writes of the pea and other pulses as if 

 all Greeks knew them and had long known them — 

 without ascribing to them the novelty in point of history 

 that an American writing today of the products of the 

 New World would have to do in discussing corn, potatoes, 

 beans, pumpkins, and other plants domesticated from 

 the flora of the western continents. We have from 

 Theophrastus, then, an account of the pea as it existed 

 in Greece, an ancient vegetable three centuries before 

 the Christian era. 



It is not possible to determine when the cultivated 

 pea was taken to Rome. If it was grown in the time of 

 Cato (149 B.C.) or of Varro (27 B.C.), greatest of early 

 Roman farm writers, the name pisum seems not to 

 have been used, and if the pea was cultivated in the time 

 of these Roman farmers it was under some general names 

 then as now pulse, or legume. But in the first cen- 

 tury of the Christian era the pea was well known by the 

 Latins and is mentioned by Columella and Pliny as it 

 was by Virgil in the century before Christ. 



It is certain, however, if one may judge from the old 

 farm writers, that the pea was of less importance to the 

 Latins as a vegetable than the chick-pea, lupin, bean, 

 and the vetch. The reason for its neglect probably was 

 that the climate of the Mediterranean countries is a 

 little too warm for the pea, a vegetable which grows best 

 in cool temperate regions. 



But while the pea was relatively unimportant in 

 southern Europe it was one of the commonest and most 

 grown vegetables in cooler climates of northern Europe 



2 Samuel, XVII. 28. 



