Developing skills in grafting and fertilizing fruit-bearing trees, propagating mulberry trees for local silk industries, planting timber trees, and even raising bees were all part of a plan by which Austen sought to relieve poverty in the process of establishing the kingdom of heaven on earth. He was a seventeenth-century “Johnny Appleseed,” as it were, seeking to realize a fruitarian commonwealth, “another Canaan, flowing with milk and honey.”53
