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Gardener shares history of Dolly Parton tomato

Barbara "Bobbi" Furtado-Mason shows her prized Dolly Parton tomatoes took the blue ribbon prize at the Burke County Fair.

Staff reports

Published: August 25, 2008

Barbara "Bobbi" Furtado-Mason and her prized Dolly Parton tomatoes took the blue ribbon prize in this year's 59th annual Burke County Fair in the horticulture division.
Furtado-Mason, an avid gardener, moved to Burke County six years ago from her beloved Haywood County. Maintaining a rigid health routine to combat severe degenerative osteoporosis and three herniated discs, among other health problems, Furtado-Mason is able to handle her small 6x18 (approximately 100 sq. ft.) English garden on Lenoir Street in downtown Morganton, which includes four to six Better Boy tomato stalks, a banana pepper and a bell pepper, numerous herbs and spices, a butterfly bush, hosta and other various flowers, vines and bushes, mostly started from cuttings from neighbors and friends.
This year, a neighbor gave her two Dolly Parton tomato plants, culminating in the Blue Ribbon prize.
The tomato got its name by horticulturists/researchers using genetic variations, the equivalent of the typical overdone.
Parton, the singer/celebrity, is known as much for her big blonde hair and — how shall we put this? — ample upper anatomy, so they named the experimental tomato Dolly Parton because they were big and juicy.
Cultivars, an organism of a kind originating and persistent under cultivation, and plants that have additional names in single quotes after the two-part botanical name, are prized for their unusual characteristics.
Dahlias as large as dinnerplates, gigantic pompom chrysanthemums, or the purple coneflower Echinacea purpurea "Magnus" reincarnated, are examples of cultivars.
These plant pets, you could say, are cultivars like Holstein cows, quarter horses and Chihuahuas, domesticated organisms created when human beings apply artificial selection pressures to control the species' evolutionary course.
Since our neolithic ancestors began domesticating wild plants 10,000 or 15,000 years ago, we humans have been encouraging certain traits and eliminating others.
Our proclivities are so predictable that researchers have come up with a fancy moniker for the process: the domestication syndrome. For example, the plants become easier to grow and produce the desired product more reliably or abundantly, whether it is flashier flowers or a larger potato tuber. The valuable, to us, parts of the plant — flower, seed, fruit, root — grow huge; scientists call this phenomenon gigantism.
To be an effective natural gardener, we need to know a lot more about the reproductive preferences, genetic profiles and possible ecological effects of plants we decide to grow.
When in doubt, a good rule of thumb is to buy native species that have been propagated sexually, by seed collected from diverse nearby natural populations. Besides, on a planet replete with Dolly Partons, there would be no Pam Tillis, no Shania Twain, no Barbara Mandrell. In the meantime, she's just floating on air with her whang-dang blue ribbon and who knows, she may enter my yard-long green beans next year.

Research includes information from 'Gardening in the Age of Extinction,' Brooklyn Botanic Garden: Cultivar Crazy and other gardening magazines.