Homegarden-based Indigenous Fruit Tree Production in Peninsular India - Indigenous Fruit Trees in the Tropics: Domestication, Utilization and Commercialization - page 86

5.3 Homegardens as Laboratories for Crop Evolution and Diversity
The continuing inventive spirit of the prehistoric gardeners, who nurtured the
volunteers and deliberately planted trees around their homesteads, probably
makes the present-day homegardeners 'perpetual experimenters' as well. These
garden owners constantly try out and test new species and varieties, including
methods to improve their management. Coincidentally, both naturally
occurring wild plants and deliberately introduced plants abound in these
gardens (Kumar et al ., 1994). A new species may be chosen because of its
properties (i.e. food, wood, medicinal, religious or ornamental), based on
intuition or information passed on by neighbours and relatives. The suite of
homegarden species therefore contains diverse functional groups such as fruit
trees, vegetables, medicinal plants, ornamental plants, and tall trees for shade,
timber, fruits, nuts and resins.
Women play a significant and special role in the acquisition of new species
in the Kerala homegardens, in common with some other regions (e.g. Yamada
and Osaqui, 2006). The seeds may be gathered from other homegardens, from
wild populations, or from cultivated areas. Friends, relatives, neighbours,
workers and visitors also contribute plant species as gifts, or give them in
exchange for other species. A more recent phenomenon is the procurement of
planting materials of medicinal/ornamental plants, fruits and nuts from
government farms and/or commercial nurseries.
The choice of species and planting techniques reflects the accrued wisdom
and insights of people who have interacted with the environment for
generations and have made homegardens a principal hub of crop evolution
and diversity. It is also reasonable to assume that indigenous cultivators use
rational ecological approaches to manipulate the plants, and this may confer
sustainability on the system. Homegardening thus constitutes a unique land-
use activity that not only integrates the key processes of tree domestication,
such as identification, production, management and adoption of agroforestry
tree genetic resources ( sensu Leakey and Tchoundjeu, 2001), but also mirrors a
substantial indigenous knowledge base. None the less, agroforestry tree
domestication is regarded as a farmer-driven, market-led process, focusing on
conventional timber-tree improvement, which emerged in the early 1990s
(Simons and Leakey, 2004). The result is that the remarkable breakthroughs
attained by conventional gardeners over generations, largely through
uncoordinated activities, are often overlooked. Furthermore, agricultural
transformations brought about by market economies in the recent past,
especially the incorporation of exotic commercial crops (e.g. the rubber tree,
Hevea brasiliensis ) has led to the destruction of some of these traditional
gardens (Kumar and Nair, 2004).
5.4 Fruit-tree Diversity in Kerala Homegardens
While progress in modern agriculture has been through monospecific stands,
sometimes described as 'biological deserts' of low species diversity, the tropical