Prosper Jules Alphonse Berckmans, Sr. (1830-1910) was born near Brussels, Belgium, to Louis Edouard Mathieu Berckmans (1801-1883), a distinguished horticulturist. P.J.A. Berckmans was educated in France, later returning to Belgium in 1847 to work on his father’s estates and to study botany at the Botanical Gardens of Brussels. In 1850, P.J.A. Berckmans moved to Plainfield, New Jersey, followed by his father in 1851. Later, the Berckmans moved to Augusta, Georgia, to run a nursery on a property known as "Pearmont," which they purchased from Benjamin Warren in 1857. In 1858, they purchased an adjacent property and nursery, "Fruitland," from horticulturist Dennis Redmond. The Berckmans combined Pearmont and Fruitland to create the expanded Fruitland Nurseries. One of the first commercial nurseries in the South, Fruitland Nurseries was a world-class experimental station and botanical garden, growing numerous varieties of fruit trees and ornamentals and disseminating them throughout the United States. P.J.A. Berckmans founded the Georgia Horticultural Society in 1876, serving as the organization’s president until 1910. Berckmans was a lifetime member of the American Pomological Society and served as the editor of Farmer and Gardener, a horticultural journal, for several years. When P.J.A. Berckmans died in 1910, his three sons continued to manage the business until the late 1910s. The trade name was sold to Bailie and Gwin in the early 1920s and continued to operate until the 1960s. In 1931 the property on which Fruitland Nurseries was located was sold and later established as the site of the Augusta National Golf Club, the home of the Masters Golf Tournament.