Cherokee Purple

We will be growing ‘Cherokee Purple’ tomato, a large purple heirloom variety, as the scion (theupper portion of the grafted plant with desired fruit) in our 2010 tomato field trial.

Bound by time and labor constraints, I had to choose only one tomato variety. It only made sense to grow a tomato variety that is popular among locals growers, so I made some phone calls to organic farmers in the Puget Sound area. Cherokee Purple, an heirloom that is “fairly stingy on yield” (Source: Territorial Seeds), won the popularity contest. There has been considerable interest in grafting heirlooms which are generally have low disease tolerance and have been selected for fruit quality rather than vigor hybrid. One of the benefits of grafting is increased productivity due to a more well-developed root system. Cary Rivard, a graduate student at North Carolina State University, has done a lot of work looking at the effect of grafting heirloom tomatoes.

I think that I, as well as many of my fellow tomato lovers out there, find myself drawn to the nostalgia surrounding heirloom tomatoes. All vegetables are the result of human selection, and therefore products of our culture. Centuries of culinary preferences have dictated the form, flavor, and function of the vegetables in our diet. Most of the cultivars available today are the result of plant breeding, a scientific process carried out at land grant universities and private seed companies, and many of the most widely available tomato cultivars focus on year-round availability, red color, and uniform fruit size.

The official definition of “heirloom” is very loose, being any open-pollinated variety that has been maintained for 50-100 years. 150 years ago in western civilization and more recently in much of the world, there were no vegetables but “heirloom vegetables”, no seeds but “heirloom seeds” saved by the grower at the end of each harvest. Many seed companies and growers now view heirlooms as vegetables that come in odd shapes and unusual colors, providing unique and high-value alternatives to the standard spherical red tomato. “Cherokee Purple” falls in the latter category, having a dark brownish-purple tinge when ripe.

I think of heirloom vegetables as the social life of plant breeding. These vegetables contain generations of vegetable growers in their speckles and lumps. They exist because of conversations between neighbors, letter correspondences between friends and family, contact between European settlers and Native Americans, and Native Americans agricultural practices deeply rooted in American soil. And most importantly, heirloom vegetables carry centuries of vegetable growers reflecting on their harvest with hopes for the next year’s harvest. It is this hope carried forth over generations that captures the imagination of many of today’s vegetable gardeners and consumers.

I digress. Back to our tomato of the hour.

The Story of the Cherokee Purple Tomato.

According to numerous sources, the Cherokee Purple tomato was given to a well-known heirloom tomato collector, Craig LeHoullier, by J.D.

Green. J.D. Green was from Tennessee and said that the tomato was over 100 years old and had been grown by Cherokee Indians in the area. Amazingly, below is a scanned copy of the original letter from J.D. Green as posted on Mr. LeHoullier's website.

Mr. LeHoullier, who maintains a collection of over 1000 heirloom tomato varieties, named the tomato variety “Cherokee Purple” and introduced it to the Seed Savers Exchange in 1991. It has since become a popular heirloom variety prized for its flavor and interesting purple hue.