Prosper Julius Alphonso Berckmans was born into a thousand-year-old family of nobility in Arschot, Belgium, about 1830. Educated in Belgium and France, he moved to the U.S., first settling in New Jersey before moving in 1857 to a site near Augusta, Georgia. From a fellow horticulturist he purchased a small nursery and a comfortable manor house. Immediately he planted a long avenue of magnolias approaching the manor house and proceeded to develop a family estate suitable to the life of an affluent country gentleman. He named the nursery "Fruitlands" and began importing, selecting, and distributing the greatest variety of trees, plants, and shrubs ever seen in the South. And so successful were Berckmans's efforts that within three years - when he was still only thirty- he was the most famous horticulturist in the South.
In 1908 the U.S. Department of Agriculture declared that Berckmans's influence was visible in orchards all over the South, that his name was a household word to fruit growers, and that he had done more for American horticulture than almost any other man. Yet there were failures, too. Despite years of labor, for example, Berckmans never succeeded in finding varieties of pears or grapes that would thrive in the South. Nor did he succeed in persuading Georgia to provide what he considered adequate state aid to agriculture. Unhappily his latter years were blighted by family dissension, and after his death his heirs let the glory of Fruitlands fade to extinction before Bobby Jones took hold in 1931 and transformed the once grand estate with its remaining rare shrubs and gracious old trees into the Augusta National Golf Club. For the whole article beyond these excerpts, see "P. J. Berckmans: Georgia Horticulturist" by Willard Range, The Georgia Review, Summer 1952.
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