John Bidwell wanted Rancho Chico to be more than a wheat and cattle ranch. He foresaw that California could be “one grand fruit orchard”, and he would start on his ranch.

This newspaper report from 1855, only six years after he bought Rancho Chico, shows just how quickly he set to work to realize his vision.

Luckily we don’t have grasshoppers to destroy our fruit crops nowadays.

Bidwell set out his first peach trees in 1852, with a variety of peach pits obtained from Boston that produced good peaches from seed, without grafting. Three years later he had 250 peach trees with fruit, and a thousand more saplings in his nursery. His friend Nelson Blake, who had helped to plant the first trees, wrote in 1853:

How do the Peach trees look that Mr. Barber and myself set out? and the Onions we sowed? Have any of the Apple seeds that I sowed come up this last spring or the Pear or Quinces?

It looks like the apples, pears, and quinces were doing fine by 1855. The figs had been obtained from Mission San Jose in 1851, and were also thriving.

He also got his grapevines from missions and they were doing well. Later he would rip out the wine grapes and switch to raisins and table grapes.

By 1857 many farmers had followed Bidwell’s lead and were growing fine crops of tree fruit.

Of peaches, this season, the variety is extensive, and the quantity produced enormous. Some of the specimens from Smith’s, Hooker’s, &c, &c, near the city, are splendid, but the handsomest specimens of peaches we have seen this year were 1 dozen from the orchard of Major John Bidwell, of Chico, Butte county. They were sent to a friend in this city. His crop this year is reported to be very large. His trees are large and fine, and, strange to say, are all seedlings. [That is, the trees were raised from peach seeds.]

Sacramento Daily Union 5 August 1857

As for the shade trees, locust trees were what Bidwell first planted along the Esplanade. Later they were torn out and replaced with less messy street trees. “China trees” are probably chinaberry trees, a popular ornamental, and “alanthas” must be ailanthus, also known as “tree of heaven.” That tree was first brought to the United States from China in 1874. It was a popular fast-growing garden exotic in the nineteenth century. Now it pops up everywhere and is considered a noxious weed and an invasive species. I guess we have John Bidwell to thank for the ailanthus trees in Chico.