Helgi Nirk (1919-2005): Tomato breeder

Updated 23 May 2023.

 

ABC television’s Gardening Australia featured a packet of Burnley Bounty tomato seeds in its opening sequence until the end of its 2018 season. Renaissance Herbs still sells the Burnley Bounty in its salad seedling range. The Little Vegie Patch Co sells seeds of Burnley Surecrop tomatoes. Australian Seed sells Burnley Gem. This is the story of their breeder. 

Renaissance Herbs credit Helgi Nirk with
the breeding of Burnley Bounty on their Website.  Excellent!

Helgi Nirk had arrived in Australia in November 1947 with the first party of refugees from Europe after World War II. She was born a year after the end of the First World War, on 15 December 1919, in Sangaste, in the southern Estonian province of Valgamaa. 

Her father had been a schoolteacher at the local school. Then he had gone to the Caucasus, where oil had been discovered, to work as a bookkeeper. He had come back a wealthy man. 

He used his money to improve the farm near Sangaste which he had inherited from his father. He developed it into a model mixed farm. University and high school students used to visit the farm for classes on its operations.

Helgi’s father had died when she was only ten years old. He had been aged 56 when she was born, having followed an Estonian pattern of the man making his career and money before settling down with a wife.  Helgi's mother died seven years later, having been old for a first-time mother, 39, when Helgi was born.

Helgi disagreed with her uncles on how she should manage her inheritance. They asked a court to give her full responsibility for her own affairs. The court granted this right when Helgi was only 18. As in Australia, 21 was then the normal age of legal majority in Estonia. Hers would have been a rare case. It is an early demonstration of her strength of character. 

Helgi Nirk in 1959

Elderly tenants helped her by feeding the farm animals, cows and pigs. When she was 20, the Soviet Union invaded independent Estonia. She thought that her future would be that of an employee of a state farm, a prospect which did not appeal. She decided to alter that future by enrolling in agricultural science at Estonia’s centuries-old University of Tartu. She was able to recruit share-farmers to continue working the land for her. 

Tartu University's main building and surrounds, much as they would have looked
when Helgi Nirk studied there in the early 1940s.
Photo by Kaupo Kalda from EstonianWorld.com

She should not have been able to enrol at the University as the daughter of a kulak, a landowner from a peasant background. The helpful local authorities gave her an identity card which described her truthfully as a child from the country without parents. In Russia, the kulaks had opposed the collectivisation of land. Stalin had ordered their liquidation in 1929. In the countries occupied by the Soviet Army during World War II, the practice was to round up kulaks and their families for train trips in cattle wagons to the extremes of Siberia. 

Helgi was one of the girls who swapped their rooms with boys who thought that they were in danger. If they did that, the Soviet troops would see at once that the young men they had come to arrest were somewhere else. 

One year later, international allegiances changed when the Germans pushed through the Baltic States to lay siege to Stalingrad. Estonia was occupied by the Germans for three years. During this time, Helgi completed her agricultural science studies and was awaiting the grant of her degree. The citizens of Stalingrad resisted their siege, the Soviet Union regrouped and rearmed, and once more it invaded the Baltic States. 

Helgi left Estonia in September 1944 with the last of the German troops. She was riding under a tarpaulin in the back of a truck, on top of munitions. She knew what was in the truck, but had made the decision that being blown up with the German truck was a better end than imprisonment or exile in Siberia. 

Helgi and a friend left the convoy in Lithuania and found a train travelling towards Germany. There was no passenger carriage for them, only a wagon without sides, little more than an open platform on wheels. The train was travelling away from the Soviet Army. That was all that mattered. 

The train stopped in Danzig, then a Prussian port city in turmoil. Nobody they asked knew what was going on. 

Central Danzig in 1945, after destruction by bombs and artillery fire;
Unknown photographer, sourced through Wikipedia

All who reached Danzig on that train were told that, before they could move on, they had to dig anti-tank trenches to halt the Soviet Army. Helgi’s friend was willing to do as ordered, but Helgi had another idea. 

The other travellers were led behind a wire fence. Helgi and her friend lay on their stomachs on the wagon which had brought them to Danzig. When darkness fell, they grabbed their small suitcases and walked carefully around the railway station to its western entrance. This was the entrance nearest to their destination, so they no longer looked as if they were Baltic refugees. 

They demanded and received two train tickets for the far west of Germany, Mannheim on Rhine. They got as far as Berlin, which they found also to be in turmoil. There were masses of people among the ruins of bombed buildings. Helgi went looking for a train to the west, while her friend guarded their luggage. 

Berlin in ruins, August 1947:  photograph from George Kiddle,
one of the three-man team which selected First Transport passengers

A German in a decorated uniform, evidently an important officer, saw that she was distressed. He accompanied her back to the travellers’ aid office where her inquiries had already been rebuffed. Seeing the officer, the women behind the counter were now ready to assist. 

He discovered that Helgi and her friend had been three weeks on the road. He took them to the apartment of a female friend where, for the first time in nearly one month, they could wash and rest on beds. They were able to stay in Berlin for one week, which made it easy to find the station from which trains left to the west. 

Once they reached the west of Germany, Helgi and her friend were able to stop their flight. Helgi got work picking vegetables for the market on a small farm at Hockenheim. One day she found herself under Allied bombing attack. She threw herself to the ground at the sound of the approaching plane. As bombs hit the ground, she was covered with soil. When she scrabbled out from her covering of earth, she found that the cart nearby had been destroyed. The horse pulling the cart had been killed. Helgi was deaf for nearly one week. 

In Mannheim, she nearly found herself under arrest. Everyone was permitted to change 500 Occupation Deutschmarks into real Deutschmarks in one transaction, but no more. She had been changing her money in various towns across Germany, but she grew tired of the 500 Occupation DM limit. She asked a bank in Mannheim if she could change a few thousand in one transaction. “Please wait here”, she was told. She waited and waited, a friend for company. 

Suddenly she was confronted by a group of police and bank officials. “Where did you get this money? Who did you rob?” The money actually had come from the private sale of extra bacon and butter from her Estonian farm during the German occupation. That could be considered to be trading on the black market, so she told her interrogators that it came from the sale of her farm. This satisfied them. Fortunately, they did not know that selling anything in Estonia under the German occupation was also illegal. 

Under the American occupation, there was another incident when she almost lost her life. Word went out among the local refugees that an animal had been butchered and the meat was available for free. Helgi did not realise that the free meat offer was for refugees only. 

She told a German who had been kind to her about the offer. When a drunken American Army officer realised that there was a German in the butcher’s shop and Helgi had invited him there, he raised his pistol to shoot her. Another American pushed his hand so that the pistol fired out of harm’s way. 

While she was in a camp for displaced persons, she noted the UNRRA enthusiasm for DDT. Not only did they insist on dousing the inmates with liberal quantities to control insect infestations, they also tried to feed them spoonfuls. 

From Hockenheim, Helgi moved to Heidelberg, where she worked for the American Red Cross Club in a former museum. Her task was to organise concerts for the Americans. This was not taxing work. It supplied her with free food and accommodation. Downstairs the Americans had access to free coffee and doughnuts. Helgi had enough free doughnuts to last her the rest of her days. 

She moved to Stuttgart, where she studied genetics at the Hohenheim University, which has the oldest agricultural science faculty in the world. After completing this course, she was about to start on chemistry when she heard that the Australians wanted to send a ship of displaced persons to Australia. She got herself on the interview list by contacting a cousin who was working with UNRRA. 

This 1845 lithograph by JH Renz shows the main building of the
University of Hohenheim as it still is today,
so certainly as it was when Helgi studied there

A Canadian team had already interviewed her and declared her to be a suitable migrant, but Canada had not begun moving those they had selected. In comparison to the Canadians, the Australians had easy tests. Helgi did her best to make sure that she was on that first ship, because she was always hungry. 

Her trip on the General Stuart Heintzelman was very good, indeed lovely. She passed the time playing chess, reading and sunbaking. Her recollection of Fremantle and Perth is that they were beautiful and clean. Like some of the other Estonian women, she found the Kanimbla filthy. She remembers cockroaches in the soup on board this Australian Navy vessel. 

In Bonegilla she shared a room with another Estonian, Helmi Liiver. When they reached their allocated room, they found it smelly, so they put down their suitcases and started to clean with scrubbing brushes and sandsoap. They found that the seats had been smeared with fat and there were rat droppings as well. 

Helmi Liiver, left, Helgi Nirk, centre, and an unidentified woman arrive
at the Bongeilla railway stop on 8 December 1947
(from the Helgi Nirk collection, Estonian Archives in Australia)

Having cleaned the room to the best of their ability, the two young women went to have a shower. A large animal perching on a wooden beam in the shower facilities startled them. Despite its sharp claws, it turned out to be a relatively tame camp possum. 

The first job to which Helgi was sent was at the Austin Hospital in Melbourne, to train as a nursing sister. After the privations of the War and post-War Germany, the displaced trainee nurses found that they were still expected to live in relative poverty. They had only £1/3/3 left after payments for their board and lodging were deducted. 

Helgi's own battered, yellowed copy of a newspaper report
on the start of her nursing career,
from the Melbourne Herald, 5 January 1948, page 5

In order to make some more money, Helgi actively looked for extra work, so that she could leave the hospital. She met an Estonian who had come to Australia before the Second World War, who was growing tuberoses for sale in his garden. Helgi and a friend turned up to help him, despite his reluctance. After seeing how they worked, he took them on as paid assistants. 

At the end of June 1952, Helgi started work with the Victorian Department of Agriculture as a laboratory assistant on even lower wages than before, but at least she was working in agriculture. For the next ten years, she had a second job as often as she could find one - gardening, cleaning, making buttonholes for children’s clothes. 

On one occasion, she found out that a two-storey building near where she was staying in Chapel Street, Prahran, needed painting. The owner could not find a tradesman to do the job, such was the shortage of building workers in the first years after the War. 

Helgi took on the task, single-handedly. The owner was able to arrange for scaffolding to be built. He moved it himself whenever Helgi had finished painting a section of the building. 

By 1955, less than eight years after she arrived in Australia, Helgi was able to buy a property in the Dandenong Ranges. The house had not been lived in for a decade or so. The land was overrun with tough plants like blackberries and ivy, and a tall privet hedge on the high side of the hill, along the road, cast its shade over the front garden. Again, mostly single-handedly, Helgi poisoned and removed the unwanted plants. 

She turned the soil into the production of flowering plants. The house was cleaned up so that Helgi could move there in 1956. She started to collect plants for her property. 

Helgi’s work focus became tomatoes for the commercial growers of Victoria. She developed two varieties, K7 and the very fleshy 7002, which became so popular with the growers trialling them that they never had the chance to be named properly before commercial release. 

Named varieties for which Helgi was responsible included not only Burnley Bounty, Burnley Surecrop and Burnley Gem but also Burnley Fortune, Burnley Metro, and Arcadia. 

The prestigious scientific journal Nature, in its issue of 5 December 1959, carried an article by Helgi on how to obtain fertile hybrids from two tomato species which did not cross-fertilise naturally. Her success was due to the use of both stock and graft materials which were just beyond the dicotyledon stage of development, when only the first two leaves show above the ground. 

The aim of the experiments was to produce commercial tomato varieties which had the disease resistance of a Peruvian parent as well as the yield and fruit quality of a conventional parent. The cell materials from the stock tended to merge with the materials from the scion because of the very early stage of development at which the grafting has been performed. 

When the plants grew older, it was possible to use their pollen for normal cross-fertilisation and the resulting plants had some of the characteristics of each parent. Examination under the microscope showed that the cells of the hybrid plants had chromosomes from both parents. 

The Nature article created interest around the world. Other plant breeders had success with the technique. For example, jute hybrids in India were obtained from two species which had not interbred previously. 

International visitors now made a point of meeting with Helgi. One delegation from the Soviet Union came specifically to study Helgi’s tomato breeding. When she took the Armenian geneticist and his interpreter to field trials, the geneticist assured her of a good job if she returned to the Soviet Union. Helgi reminded him that this offer was a risk too huge for her to take. 

Helgi also received offers of employment as a tomato breeder in Spain and California. She was already so happy on her property in the Dandenongs that she did not want to leave. It was her own piece of paradise. 

Despite the encouragement of the supervisor who told her that her work was unique and should be recorded for other researchers in Nature, Helgi found that her employer could not deal with her lack of formal qualifications. She lodged applications and appeals, but she received neither promotions nor pay increases beyond those awarded to compensate for the slowly rising cost of living. 

This passport enabled Helgi to go on a tour of tomato breeding institutions
during July-August 1972 on behalf of the Victorian Department of Agriculture
from the Helgi Nirk collection, Estonian Archives in Australia

Helgi did more research which may well have been as original as her work on the tomato hybrids, but she kept it to herself. English was a language in which she had been working for only ten years. Writing the Nature article had been a major effort. She did not feel the need to repeat the effort because she knew that she already had international recognition for her work. 

As the lack of recognition from those for whom she worked was upsetting, putting in the effort to write more articles for scientific journals would only have stirred up more enmity, she thought. 

The business which had developed around her house, Helgi’s Nursery, became a refuge. She resigned from the Department of Agriculture on the day that she became eligible to access her superannuation, her sixtieth birthday. 

Helgi had experienced other, more overt discrimination when she first lived in Melbourne. On one occasion, she and her friend were told by the operator to speak English on phone. “Why?” responded Helgi. “This is not wartime.” The operator cut them off. 

On a Melbourne tram, a fellow passenger told her and her friend to “speak Australian”. Helgi responded that she had not learnt an Aboriginal language yet. The other passengers were on the side of the Estonians. There was so much laughter that the man left the tram at the next stop. 

Estonia did not find its freedom while Helgi was still fit to travel, so she never returned. She undertook many trips in Europe, North America and Asia, visiting relatives, friends and fellow researchers. 

Helgi closed the nursery to customers in the mid-1990s. At its peak, she had hundreds of different plants growing on the site. Fuchsias, foxgloves, feverfew, honesty and hydrangeas, rhododendrons, azaleas and alstromerias flowered in profusion, each to its own season.  

When I met Helgi there, late in her life, she had to be very particular about what she could and could not eat. She thought that her digestive problems might have been caused by the liberal use of DDT in the German camp. Given what we know about DDT, including it causing cancer in humans if the doses are high enough, she might have had a case. 

She died in her former nursery, surrounded by the beautiful gardens of her own creation, on 29 August 2005. 

Then Helgi returned to Estonia at long last. Her ashes were buried beside her parents in the Sangaste cemetery. 

Sangaste Cemetery gate and boundary wall
Photograph by Ivar Leidus, from Wikimedia Commons

 

 

 

On 27 October 2006, the University of Tartu compensated for Helgi for her lack of formal qualifications by appointing her a Honorary Member.  The University's Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology says, "It is a great honor for our institute that two persons, who have significantly contributed to the achievement of the statutory goal of the University of Tartu, among other things with significant financial support, have been appointed honorary members of the University of Tartu."

 

I would have thought that Helgi's undergraduate education at that University plus her career as a plant breeder should have been enough to earn her that honour.  However, it is likely that a donation of 3 million Estonian kroons, worth more than $300,000 in Australian currency and probably from her estate, to the Institute would have helped too.

I'm sure the Helgi would have been very pleased by the honour from her alma mater.

I thank Helgi Nirk for sharing her life story.  Her papers are held in the Sydney-based Estonian Archives in Australia.

REFERENCES

Australian Seed, 'Tomato Burnley Gem, Lycopersicon esculentum', https://www.australianseed.com/shop/item/tomato-burnley-gem/, accessed 5 July 2021. 

'Balt nurses start work', The Herald, Melbourne, 5 January 1948, p 5, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/243852526, accessed 6 July 2021.

Estonian World, 3 September 2020, 'The University of Tartu among the 300 best universities in the world', https://estonianworld.com/knowledge/the-university-of-tartu-among-the-300-best-universities-in-the-world/, accessed 6 July 2021.

Geni.com, 'Helgi Nirk', https://www.geni.com/people/Helgi-Nirk/6000000011967155258?through=6000000005439112272, accessed 6 July 2021.

Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of Tartu, 'Honorary Doctors, Professors and Associated Professors', https://tymri.ut.ee/en/content/honorary-doctors-professors-and-associated-professors, accessed 23 May 2023.

Nirk, Helgi, 1959, 'Interspecific hybrids of Lycopersicum', Nature 184 pp 1819-20.

Nirk, Helgi, 1972, 'Study tour of tomato breeding institutions', Melbourne, Victoria, Department of Agriculture.

Renaissance Herbs, 'Tomato Burnley Bounty', https://renaissanceherbs.com.au/product/tomato-burnley-bounty/, accessed 5 July 2021. 

The Little Vegie Patch Co 'Tomato, Burnley Surecrop Heirloom Seeds', https://littleveggiepatchco.com.au/collections/tomato-seeds/products/burnley-surecrop-heirloom-seeds-1-1?variant=239173155, accessed 6 July 2021

University of Hohenheim, 11 June 2019, 'Campus', https://www.uni-hohenheim.de/en/campus-en, accessed 6 July 2021.

Vaba Eesti Sõna (Free Estonian Word), 19 February 1987, 'Helgi Nirgi tomat' ('Helgi Nirk's tomato), p 6, complete issue downloaded from https://dea-digar-ee.translate.goog/?a=d&d=vabaeestisona19870219.1.6&e=-------et-25--1--txt-txIN%7CtxTI%7CtxAU%7CtxTA-------------&_x_tr_sl=et&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=sc&_x_tr_hist=true 23 May 2023.

Valgamaa kodulooline andmebaas ISIK (Valga County History Database PERSON) 'Nirk, Helgi', https://isik.test.pix.ee/index.php?id=1238, accessed 23 May 2023.

Wikipedia, History of Gdansk, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gda%C5%84sk, accessed 6 July 2021.