In my last post, I talked about how Mr. Rodger Winn of Rodger's Heirloom Vegetable Plants asked me to help him do some research into exactly when Park Seed Company marketed some plants developed by his wife's late uncle, Mr. J. C. Metze. We did find one of Mr. Metze's vegetables, the Selma Zebra pole bean, in the 1977 catalog. This left us with two mysteries. First, why was the bean called Zelma or Selma? And second, what was the first year that Park Seed offered Selma Zebra?
Mr. Winn himself had information about why the bean was named Selma. Through the magic of Google, I found an article by someone who met Mr. Winn at a seed-swapping event and got some of the story:
"This day we also met Rodger Winn, who gardens in South Carolina and who sold us gorgeous $1.00 tomato plants with the names the likes of Tennessee Britches (who could resist!!), and gave us the fabulous Zelma Zesta bean. Rodger explained that his wife Karen’s great uncle J. C. Metze developed this beautiful and flavorful pole bean, which was eventually marketed byPark Seed.
"Mr. Metze was from Little Mountain, SC and was a dedicated seed-saver. He developed the bean in the 40’s and 50’s by careful selection from his crops. In the 60’s he approached Park with his final selection, which then went to trial in Selma, Alabama. Park bought the rights to market the bean, and it appeared in several catalogs in the early 60’s as the Selma Zester; however, Rodger says 'Mr. J. C. always referred to the name as the Zelma Zesta, and that is how he presented it to me in the early 80’s.' Mr. Metze and his wife have now passed on, and his one surviving brother cannot remember any details on the bean. Rodger did contact Park Seed, who told him that all their beans from the 60’s into the 70’s had the name Selma as they were grown out for production in the same fields in Alabama. Rodger states about the name '…we kept the name Zelma Zesta as written on the original seed Mr. J. C. Metze gave me, and most folks around here who have this bean or knew of it just referred to it as Mr. J. C.’s Greenbean.'"
Aha! Now we know where Selma came from. But we'll probably never know why Mr. J. C. changed it to Zelma. Perhaps he just thought it was more zesty? Had a little more zing, perhaps?
Now, what about the date question? The particular Park Seed 1977 seed catalog that we found was a bound marked book. In the cataloger's world, a marked book is one that contains sales figures tied to each item and its specific location in the catalog. By carefully analyzing a year-by-year series of marked books, it's possible to determine if a particular product sells better when it's at the front of the book rather than the back, or if the picture is bigger, or if the copy is longer or shorter. In this particular case, the marked book shows sales figure for 1976 and for 1977, to help with the year-over-year comparison. As it happens, there is no Selma Zebra sales data for 1976--only for 1977. It is typical for a seed to appear year after year and unusual for it to drop out and then come back. Therefore, I think there's a good possibility that 1977 was the first year that Park Seed Company offered the Selma Zebra pole bean. That's my hypothosis, anyway!
If you have better information about the Selma/Zelma questions or a vegetable mystery of your own that you'd like to explore, contact me at ckuhl@parkseed.com. I always enjoy hearing from you! And I would particularly appreciate your sending me old catalogs that you would be willing to donate to our archive. In working with Mr. Winn, I found that while we have an extensive (although far from complete) collection of Park's Floral Magazine from the 1960s, we are woefully limited in actual catalogs from the period of 1950 to 1979.
