Arbiter of Heirlooms

The Tomatoes of Amy Goldman

by Jennifer May and photographs by Jennifer May, June 25, 2008

On the 200-acre site of a former dairy farm in Rhinebeck, Amy Goldman has built a fortress around her vegetable gardens. Accessed through a gate by way of a call button, a half-mile driveway meanders through fields and forests, lined by stone walls, sugar maples, and a pond the size of a small lake. Near the heart of the property, a second gate opens at a vehicle’s approach. An impeccably restored 1788 Colonial farmhouse graces the inner sanctum, with a glass-walled greenhouse nearby, adjoining potting shed, and brick-lined herb garden. The grounds buzz with activity in early June: Goslings stagger across the lawn and rouse a trio of Indian Runner ducks from their preening. Beyond the fowl, workmen move trees while college interns prepare a vine-draped pergola for the onslaught of visitors Goldman expects through summer, heralded by the August publication of her third book, The Heirloom Tomato—From Garden to Table: Recipes, Portraits, and History of the World’s Most Beautiful Fruit (Bloomsbury).

Goldman has good reason to believe that if she wrote it they will come. After the publication of her previous books, journalists, photographers, and videographers from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and “The Victory Garden” flocked to her gardens. Goldman is far more than a gardener. Equal parts author, detective, and plantsmith, Goldman researches, propagates, grows, tastes, preserves, and promotes heirloom vegetables and records her findings, which she has been doing for 35 years. Most recently her life has been consumed with tomatoes. Before that it was squash, and before that, melons. Both obsessions led to books—Melons for the Passionate Grower (Artisan, 2002) and The Compleat Squash (Artisan, 2004).

Goldman grows tomatoes—and all her heirloom vegetables—because they are living folklore: rare, beautiful, historic, and, at their culinary best, more delicious than mass-market commodities. She also grows them because heirloom seeds contain valuable genetic diversity that is rapidly disappearing from the Earth. Goldman is part of what she describes as a subversive subculture that aims to keep this genetic material alive. Members are as varied as government officials, homesteaders in Appalachia, and hobbyist kitchen-gardeners.

Goldman sets a bronze casting of a giant tomato onto the table in her screened porch overlooking the pond. She flips open the first copy of her new book to a full-page photograph of the original specimen. Its name is Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter and its line can be traced back to West Virginia in the 1930s. Goldman says, “My mission in life is to get seeds back into the hands of farmers and gardeners.” She is on the board of the New York Botanical Garden and the New York Restoration Project, and is a chair of the board of the Seed Savers Exchange, the largest organization of its kind in the world. She travels across the globe to attend conferences and farmers markets and her eyes are always scouting. On a trip to New Zealand she saw fields of blue pumpkins. On a stroll in the Galapagos Islands, off the coast of Ecuador, she spotted the foliage of a wild tomato sprawling on the ground. She took a cluster home, planted the seeds, and named the resulting cultivar, with its tiny, juicy fruit, Sara’s Galapagos, for her daughter. Goldman later offered the seeds to the Seed Savers Exchange and they can now be found commercially.

The heirloom movement is gaining ground. This year marks the opening of the Global Seed Vault in Norway—a storage facility built into the side of a mountain and descending 500 feet down into the permafrost. It was constructed to withstand bomb blasts and earthquakes, and already holds millions of seed samples from around the world.