When the Avocado Was Still an Experiment

J. J. Broomall and California's New Fruit Industry

Copyright © 2026 by Steve K. Lloyd.
All rights reserved.

In April 1934, dahlia breeder J. J. Broomall used his weekly newspaper column to challenge a piece of gardening advice that some of his friends had received. They had been told that avocado seedlings were worthless unless they were budded or grafted with a named variety. Broomall knew why the advice existed, but he thought it went too far.

He had avocado seedlings of his own. Some had never fruited. Others had produced fruit so poor that he discarded the trees. One, however, had behaved very differently. It was a seedling of the Ganter avocado, and Broomall reported that it had produced more fruit the previous year than any of his budded trees. Its fruit resembled that of its parent so closely that he claimed he could see no difference. He knew that Ganter had a serious commercial defect, but he liked its eating quality enough that his successful seedling was staying exactly as it was. He had no intention of grafting it over or removing it.

Broomall was not arguing that everyone should fill a garden with avocado seedlings. He immediately gave almost the opposite advice to anyone who wanted predictable results. A grower with limited space who wanted a particular kind of fruit should buy a good budded tree from a reliable nursery. Seedlings took room, time, and patience, because they had to grow long enough to reveal what they would become. Then he explained why he intended to keep raising them anyway: "there is always a chance of getting something better." Every established fruit and flower variety, he reminded his readers, had ultimately begun with variation in an individual plant.

For readers who know Broomall principally as a dahlia breeder, the passage is revealing. He was looking at avocados through habits of thought developed over decades of raising dahlia seedlings. Variation created uncertainty, but uncertainty was also where improvement began. Most seedlings could be rejected. An exceptional one could be preserved. The method required patience, observation, and the willingness to give an unproven plant enough time to show what it could do.

The date matters as much as the reasoning. Broomall was not contemplating a mature California crop whose commercial varieties had long since been settled. He was writing while Californians were still deciding which avocados deserved to be grown, where they should be grown, how they should be propagated, how their fruit should be handled, and how enough consumers could be persuaded to eat an expanding crop. The avocado was already a commercial fruit, but it was not yet a settled one.

As it happened, one of the most consequential seedlings in the industry's history was growing unremarked only a short drive from Eagle Rock at the very moment Broomall was making his case for the seedling.

California's avocado industry was remarkably young. Seedling trees had been grown experimentally in Southern California during the nineteenth century, but commercial development accelerated only in the early twentieth. The California Avocado Association was organized in 1915, in part to bring order to a crop surrounded by enthusiasm, uncertain nomenclature, and a proliferation of varieties. By 1926, roughly 400 named avocado varieties had been listed. In 1933, the Association's Variety Committee was still reducing, classifying, and testing them.

One cultivar had already risen far above the rest. Fuerte, propagated from budwood collected in Atlixco, Mexico, survived the destructive Southern California freeze of 1913 and became the foundation of the California industry. Its combination of fruit quality, useful season, and relative hardiness made it exceptionally important. But its dominance did not close the question of which avocados to grow so much as sharpen it, because it gave growers a concrete standard against which every other candidate could be measured.

An avocado could be excellent in one respect and inadequate in another, and that was the difficulty the standard exposed. Joseph Brodkey, manager of the Avocado Sales Company in Los Angeles, reported to the California Avocado Association in 1928 on varieties from the market standpoint. His judgments took in fruit size, appearance, keeping and handling qualities, consumer response, and selling price.

He called Fuerte the most popular variety and praised its combination of size, keeping ability, and handling. Ganter, the variety that later interested Broomall, could find a ready market at the proper time, Brodkey reported, but developed conspicuous brown spots after cracking.

Broomall made a comparable distinction from the grower's side six years later. He considered Ganter desirable for home use because of its quality, but unsuitable for the commercial market because the fruit tended to burn at the outer end before it was ready to eat. His judgment does not have to match Brodkey's diagnosis of the fruit problem to be historically useful. Both men were recognizing the same larger principle: eating quality alone did not make a commercial avocado.

By 1933, the California Avocado Association had formalized that kind of sorting. Its Variety Committee placed Fuerte alone on its list of commercial varieties. Other cultivars were listed as candidates for commercial status, varieties for amateur collections and experimental plantings, varieties especially useful where cold hardiness mattered, and registered seedlings deserving wider trial.

California growers therefore faced two objectives that could appear contradictory. Commercial production demanded fewer dependable varieties and greater uniformity, while future improvement still depended upon the variation that uniformity was meant to suppress.

J. Eliot Coit, one of the central figures in California avocado horticulture, expressed the distinction particularly clearly during the years surrounding Broomall's articles.

Writing for Southern California home gardeners in 1931, Coit recommended budded avocado trees rather than seedlings. A homeowner generally had limited space and wanted to know what kind of fruit a tree would eventually produce. A seedling could occupy years and considerable ground before revealing whether its fruit justified keeping it. For a person with enough land to experiment, seedlings were another matter.

Coit was not opposed to seedlings. In an address delivered later that year, he approached the same question from the standpoint of varietal improvement. California, he argued, still needed better avocados, and promising seedlings deserved to be identified and tested. The industry could not obtain future varieties without continuing to explore the variation that seedlings produced. That is essentially the position Broomall took in 1934.

The similarity does not make Broomall an important figure in the California avocado industry, and there is no evidence that avocado specialists were looking to him for leadership. It places him somewhere more historically revealing. He was an experienced plant breeder standing somewhat outside the professional avocado establishment who had independently arrived at a distinction its specialists understood very well.

A budded tree was the rational choice when the objective was dependable reproduction of a known variety. A seedling was valuable for the opposite reason: it could turn out to be something no one had seen before.

Later avocado history confirms how deeply private seedling growers participated in California varietal development. Berthold O. Bergh of the University of California Citrus Experiment Station observed in 1957 that California growers had raised avocado seedlings in numbers ranging from a few accidental survivors to thousands of plants, hoping to find better varieties. Most selections proved inferior, but locally selected seedlings supplied much of the varietal material from which the industry developed. Formal controlled avocado breeding at the University came later.

This helps place Broomall accurately. With dahlias, he had decades of experience as a breeder. With avocados, the surviving evidence shows him primarily as an experimental seedling grower and selector. He was not making controlled crosses or conducting a scientific avocado breeding program. He was doing something characteristic of California horticulture at the time: raising seedlings, watching them mature, rejecting failures, and retaining individuals that seemed worth keeping.

Avocados were not an isolated late-life enthusiasm for Broomall. His 1934 series, My Experiences in the Improvement of Plants, shows him applying the same questions to a succession of fruits.

His sapote provided one example. When he planted it more than twenty years earlier, only seedlings were available. He knew from local experience that seedling sapotes varied greatly. His own tree proved productive and bore fruit he considered good, while other seedlings in Eagle Rock had turned out to be worthless.

His loquats provided another. Broomall had nearly a dozen seedling loquat trees and only one named budded variety, 'Advance.' He judged about half his seedlings equal to 'Advance,' one or two superior to it, and the remainder good enough to retain. Even then, he advised a homeowner with limited ground to plant one or two good budded varieties rather than wait for seedlings to prove themselves.

The same series ends, at least in the surviving installments, with Broomall raising hundreds of fig seedlings because he hoped to obtain "something better, or at any rate something different." His first attempts at sowing the tiny seeds were awkward, but the seedlings fascinated him. He transplanted them, watched their rapid growth, and continued experimenting even when no immediate financial return was apparent.

These accounts place his avocado seedlings inside a broader late-life movement from ornamental breeding toward plants he considered economically useful. The subject had changed, but his experimental logic had not.

Dahlias had taught Broomall to expect variation. They had also taught him not to confuse variation with improvement. A breeder produces or encounters differences and then judges them. Most new forms do not deserve preservation. The few that do are valuable precisely because their appearance could not be guaranteed in advance.

That logic fits his 1934 avocado argument better than the idea that he was simply defending seed-grown trees. Broomall discarded failures and valued reliable budded varieties. What he refused to accept was a rule that eliminated the experimental population from which an improved future variety might emerge.

There was another lesson Broomall carried into his fruit experiments: a plant could be excellent and still be wrong for Eagle Rock.

Immediately before his later discussions of loquats and avocados, he devoted an installment of My Experiences to tropical and subtropical plants that had disappointed him. He had paid good money for a sapodilla that barely grew, lost grafted mangoes that could not tolerate his conditions, and repeatedly failed with papayas despite obtaining seed and plants from several sources. A frost killed his most promising papaya after it had reached several feet in height.

His conclusion was not that mangoes or papayas were undesirable fruits. He thought highly of them. The trouble was environmental, because the forms available to him were poorly suited to his location.

California avocado specialists were making similar distinctions on a commercial scale. Coit's varietal recommendations recognized that the coastal belt, foothills, and colder interior districts could require different cultivars. The Association's 1933 Variety Committee even maintained a separate list of varieties considered especially hardy to cold, including Fuerte.

This keeps Broomall's faith in improvement from becoming abstract optimism. Plants had to be tested where they were expected to grow. The same variety could be valuable in one environment and unsuitable in another, so a useful new seedling had to offer more than novelty. It had to perform.

Broomall had written about avocados before his 1934 discussion of seedlings. In a December 1930 installment of The Magic of Growing Plants, he looked beyond individual trees to the prospects of the entire California industry.

He believed avocado production would increase rapidly, and he foresaw trouble if supply grew faster than public demand. Growers, he argued, would need a "campaign of education" that taught consumers how to use the fruit. When he predicted that avocados would eventually become as familiar to American housewives as bananas, he was forecasting more than orchards. He was forecasting that an unfamiliar food would become an ordinary part of American eating.

Broomall had experienced that unfamiliarity himself. He described initially finding avocados unappealing, then learning to eat them with salt, pepper, and lemon until they became part of his daily diet. His story gains significance when placed beside the work California's avocado organizations were already doing.

When E. C. Button looked back over the Association's development in 1931, he emphasized how little the avocado had been known even in Southern California when organized promotion began. The Association had used exhibits, newspaper and magazine publicity, recipes, and educational material to introduce consumers to the fruit. Calavo Growers subsequently took on the commercial work of packing, selling, and enlarging the market.

C. V. Newman, president of Calavo, described that system in 1930. Successful avocado production had come to involve not merely growing trees, but choosing appropriate varieties and rootstocks, grading and packing fruit, precooling it, shipping it under refrigeration, developing new markets, and educating consumers.

The resemblance to Broomall's concern is striking, though it should not be overstated. Broomall did not discover California's marketing problem; the industry was already organized around it. What his article shows is how clearly the problem was visible to a grower observing the crop from outside its commercial leadership.

His personal conversion from reluctant taster to enthusiastic avocado eater gave him an intuitive grasp of the difficulty. California did not merely have to produce avocados. It had to produce avocado eaters.

Broomall imagined avocado production on a grand scale. He foresaw refrigerator cars carrying California fruit eastward in trainload quantities and believed varieties suitable for shipment would become increasingly important.

By 1930, refrigerated shipment to eastern markets was no longer futuristic. California had sent a full carload of avocados to Chicago in December 1926 and a full carload to New York the following month. Newman was already discussing precooling and refrigerated distribution in his 1930 account of commercial orchard practice. Broomall, then, was predicting scale rather than invention, and that is what makes his comments interesting rather than what weakens them.

A national fruit industry required different kinds of avocados from a collection of successful backyard trees. Fruit had to tolerate picking, packing, shipping, storage, and retail handling, and it had to reach distant consumers in acceptable condition. As production expanded, commercial success depended increasingly on traits that might have little importance to the grower eating fruit beneath the tree.

By 1933, Edwin Hummason of Calavo was addressing the Association under the title "Building the Market." The industry, he explained, was confronting rapidly increasing production and the need to establish enough demand to absorb the fruit. The conversation had moved beyond whether avocados could be grown successfully in California. The question was whether a national market could grow with the orchards.

Broomall saw that transition, and, as he often did, he carried a sound observation into forecasts of enormous scale. He imagined avocados becoming exceptionally cheap, demand becoming virtually unlimited, and consumption eventually reaching extraordinary proportions. Those predictions belong to Broomall's own rhetoric and should be read as such; their historical value does not depend upon treating them as statistical forecasts.

More revealing is the mechanism he identified. Increasing production would force prices down and push growers into a new relationship with consumers. Expanding supply required expanding demand, which was precisely the problem the organized industry was working to solve.

There is a broader reason the avocado mattered to Broomall. At the beginning of My Experiences in the Improvement of Plants, he had presented the dahlia as the plant that awakened him to the possibilities of improving other species, especially plants of economic value. The later installments make that ambition visible, as his attention moves among forage crops, tropical and subtropical fruits, soil conservation, figs, loquats, avocados, and seeds.

The transition did not require him to abandon the intellectual world of the dahlia. It allowed him to extend it.

In dahlias, Broomall had spent much of his life observing the consequences of heredity and variation. Seedlings could resemble their parents, depart radically from them, or fail to justify the space they occupied. Improvement depended on raising enough variation to encounter something worthwhile and then selecting without sentimentality.

With food plants, the possible reward seemed larger to him. A better ornamental plant offered beauty. A better fruit could offer quality, productivity, hardiness, adaptability, and economic value all at once.

In his 1930 avocado discussion, he connected plant improvement directly with human welfare. The grower who produced a better avocado would not merely possess an interesting specimen. In Broomall's conception, that grower could contribute something useful to other people. His language sometimes outran what could reasonably be predicted, but the experimental principle beneath it was more durable.

In 1926, Rudolph Hass purchased avocado seedlings for a new grove at La Habra. The plan was to use the seedlings as rootstocks and graft them with Fuerte, the established commercial variety. On one seedling, repeated attempts to establish the Fuerte graft failed. The tree was allowed to remain and eventually produced its own unusual, dark-skinned fruit. Hass patented the variety that bore his name in 1935.

Broomall did not predict Hass, and there is no reason to connect the two men personally. The significance lies in the timing. While Broomall was telling readers that seedlings were unpredictable, that many would be poor, and that experimentation nevertheless had to continue because an individual seedling might offer something better, the future Hass avocado already existed as an unproven seedling in Southern California.

Its importance was not obvious. Its commercial future was not assured. It survived partly because a grower allowed an anomalous tree to demonstrate what it could do.

Later avocado breeders looking back at California's varietal history made essentially the same point at industry scale. Most seedlings were not improvements. Continued seedling selection was nevertheless indispensable, because exceptional varieties could emerge from that large population of failures and ordinary trees. Bergh specifically cited Hass as one of the valuable varieties produced through California's long tradition of seedling growing and selection.

None of this proves that Broomall was right about every avocado seedling, every inheritance claim, or every prediction he made for the crop. It illuminates what he thought experimentation was for.

By 1934, after decades spent raising dahlias, Broomall knew perfectly well that most experiments do not end with something better. That was why he kept selecting, and it was also why he kept planting. For him, uncertainty was not an argument against the seedling. It was the reason the seedling still had something to offer.

Bergh, Berthold Orphie. “Avocado Breeding in California.” Proceedings of the Florida State Horticultural Society 70 (1957): 284–290. University of California Citrus Experiment Station, Riverside.

Brodkey, Joseph. “Report on Avocado Varieties from the Market Standpoint.” California Avocado Association Yearbook 13 (1928): 90–91.

Broomall, J. J. “The Magic of Growing Plants.” Eagle Rock Advertiser, Volume 3, Number 32, 19 December 1930.

Broomall, J. J. “Some Facts Concerning Seedling Fruit Trees.” Eagle Rock Advertiser, Volume 6, Number 99, 19 April 1934.

Button, E. C. “Association History.” California Avocado Association Yearbook 16 (1931): 210–212.

California Avocado Association Variety Committee. “Report of Committee on Varieties.” Read before the annual meeting by J. Eliot Coit, May 6, 1933. California Avocado Association Yearbook 18 (1933): 23–25.

Coit, J. Eliot. “The Home Garden: What to Plant, How to Care for It.” California Avocado Association Yearbook 16 (1931): 39–42. Reprinted from the Los Angeles Times, February 15, 1931.

Coit, J. Eliot. “Avocado Varieties.” California Avocado Association Yearbook 17 (1932): 27–28. Outline of an address delivered at Carlsbad, December 17, 1931.

Hummason, Edwin. “Building the Market.” California Avocado Association Yearbook 18 (1933): 72–85. Address delivered at Vista, March 11, 1933.

Newman, C. V. “Growing an Avocado Orchard.” California Avocado Association Yearbook 15 (1930): 132–135. Newman was president of Calavo Growers of California at the time of publication.

Shepherd, John S., and Gary S. Bender. “History of the Avocado Industry in California.” California Avocado Society Yearbook 85 (2001): 29–50. 

This article was created collaboratively by the author, a dahlia grower and educator, and two AI language models.

The author directed the structure, tone, scope, and emphasis of the piece; supplied all sources; and retained full editorial control over the final text. The AIs assisted with summarizing complex technical material, suggesting phrasing, and organizing relationships among published sources provided by the author. They did not independently select sources or introduce unsupported claims.

All content was carefully reviewed, edited, and refined by the author to ensure scientific accuracy, clarity, and alignment with the Dahlia Doctor approach to evidence-based horticultural education.