The tomato's first fifty years in Europe: ten herbarium sheets, thirteen pictures and one sequenced leaf

The tomato crossed the Atlantic in Spanish hands and nobody wrote it down. Seville was the port of entry for American plants, and there is no record of the tomato arriving there. What survives instead is on the far side: a description of 1544, ten sixteenth-century herbarium specimens, thirteen drawings, and a leaf from about 1558 whose DNA has been read. It is a domesticated Mesoamerican tomato, and its European names still argue about whether it came from Mexico or Peru.