I’m guessing it’ll be early April. No, that last warm snap makes it more likely for late March. Scratch that, the cold blast pushes it to early April again. Oops, the sun just popped out this morning. OK, they’re peaking — get down to the Tidal Basin NOW to take an Instagram-friendly cherry blossom selfie.
Every year for a century and more, Hyattsvillians, like everyone else in the DMV, eagerly await the arrival of so-called “peak bloom,” that gorgeous pink canopy that appears along the District’s Tidal Basin each spring.
We know that weather, specifically the light and temperature combination, determines when peak bloom happens. But how many of us know how our beloved cherry blossoms — or those of any other plant species — get the internal green light to shoot out their flowers?
A treasured institution in our backyard — the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, or BARC — first identified the precise location and part within a plant that causes it to flower (more details on that later).
Since its founding in 1910, the BARC has hosted and spawned many other important discoveries and innovations, too — research that helps farmers and fishers produce safer food and us as consumers to eat more nutritiously.
It was at the BARC that researchers discovered that churning butter using sweet pasteurized cream instead of sour ripened cream increased butter’s shelf life. Here, too, researchers made important discoveries about how salmonella develops in pigs, and developed a vaccine against it in the 1930s. And it was at the BARC that scientists, in 1999, developed a fungicide against a particular fungus that was devastating cacao crops around the world.
But this proud chapter in our history may end soon. Last summer, the Trump administration announced that the BARC will shutter its doors, its functions getting dispersed among multiple locations across the country. Timely, then, to take stock of how this valuable institution ended up in our backyard.
Agriculture was the lifeblood of Prince George’s County economy since the county’s foundation in 1696. For nearly 300 years, one crop — tobacco — towered above all others. Tobacco was popular because it grew well in the area and generated lucrative revenues. However, it came at a steep environmental cost, severely depleting the soil’s nutrients.
It was rapacious in another way, too: Harvesting tobacco was gruelingly labor-intensive. The county relied heavily on slave labor until January 1865, when slavery was abolished in Maryland. These enslaved people were of African ancestry, with many brought to Maryland from West Africa or plantations in the West Indies. After emancipation, many formerly enslaved people continued to work tobacco fields as tenant farmers or sharecroppers.
In 1856, a new era dawned with the state approving a charter for an agricultural college at a College Park site that evolved into today’s University of Maryland. In its early years, the institution required all students to plough or hoe for an hour a day on the campus farm.
In the 1880s, Maryland designated the school as the state’s official center for agricultural research. Then in 1887, Congress passed the Hatch Act, establishing land-grant universities and authorizing federal funding for ag research. With highly regarded agricultural studies programs, the school was well positioned to receive such funding.
The next big milestone came in 1910, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture purchased the Walnut Grange plantation in Beltsville for a scientific research center. With an additional land purchase in the 1930s, the BARC site spanned some 7,000 acres. Over the years, the center became a national hub for research on food safety and nutrition, as well as on protecting plants, crops and animals from harmful diseases.
Groundbreaking research tends to be more a marathon than a sprint. The cherry blossom example above illustrates the point well: Researchers at the BARC started investigating how plants figure out when to flower way back in 1918. It took more than 40 years before they isolated the plant protein that controls flowering, with each research team building on the work of their predecessors.
They called the protein “phytochrome,” combining the Greek works for “plant” and “color.” This was a nod to how the protein, a blue-green pigment, senses variations in the quantity and quality of light in their environment — specifically light on the red end of the spectrum — and based on those readings, instructs the plant to start flowering.
It’s easier to break things than make them. With the BARC seemingly on a course of being broken up, the future of our nation’s agricultural research may hang in the balance.
This is part of a series of articles highlighting important historical sites in and around Hyattsville.