Almost one year past the date of Joel’s surprising illness and death, I still find myself in a state of confusion as I try to carry on the work he provided so much guidance for. Increasingly, I learn to turn towards the body of work Joel left behind for us all. It is a wealth of research, a deep well to draw from. His impact on me personally as a friend and mentor continues to reveal itself to me on a daily basis. I’d like to offer some words to begin to describe just some of the ways Joel generously shared his perspective and knowledge with me and so many I have worked with over the years.

For those who are not necessarily plant nerds, I ask you to be patient with me here as I will be using many binomial names of plants. It is the language I spoke with Joel.

I remember my first experience of a Joel email, sent on November 14, 2007: I was a third-year seasonal garden intern here at Bartram’s Garden and I had asked for his thoughts on planting goldenseal (Hydrastis canadensis) under the Sassafras trees near the entrance to the botanical garden from the meadow. He returned with this extraordinary response:

Goldenseal, Hydrastis canadensis would be very appropriate for the bed under the sassafras by the meadow. Todd [Greenberg] and I walked over and talked a bit about this planting area today. The shade and needle mulch from the white pine and hemlock adjacent seems ideal for a number of interesting dry woodland plants the Bartrams grew.

There is quite a bit of correspondence from John Bartram about what he called “yellow root” which is goldenseal. Bartram sent roots to Philip Miller at the Chelsea Physick Garden in the fall of 1756, and these were perhaps the earliest plants of Hydrastis canadensis in England. William Bartram also drew the plant for Peter Collinson, around 1758, and the drawing survives in the Earl of Derby’s library near Liverpool.

I have put together a list of other possible plants for the area under the sassafras. A few of John Bartram’s medicinal plants which are not in the other medicinal beds might also do well:

American ginseng, Panax quinquefolium
dwarf ginseng, Panax trifolius
wild sarsparilla, Aralia nudicaulis
robin’s plantain, Erigeron pulchellus
puttyroot, Adam-and-Eve, Aplectrum hyemale
ground pine, Lycopodium complanatum (and/or other Lycopodium species)
pearly everlasting, Anaphalis margaritacea (may need more sun)
Seneca snakeroot, Polygala senega
perfoliate bellwort, Uvularia perfoliata
blazing star, devil’s bit, Chamaelirium luteum

Other possible orchids:
pink lady’s-slipper, Cypripedium acule
yellow lady’s slipper, Cypripedium parviflorum
large twayblade, Liparis liliifolia
downy rattlesnake plantain, Goodyera pubescens

Other herbaceous plants with important Bartram connections:
wood lily, Lilium philadelphicum
American wintergreen, Pyrola Americana
pipsissewa, Chimaphila umbellata
striped prince’s pine,Chimaphila maculata
Also, any dry-adapted ferns

Possible Shrubs:
New Jersey tea, redroot, Ceanothus americanus—if there is enough sun.

Vines, possibly on the fence:
Alleghany vine, climbing fumatory, Adlumia fungosa
American bittersweet, Celastrusscandens

Joel

Over the years I’ve tried growing many of the plants on this list in different places in the Garden, to greater and lesser degrees of success. All my efforts and experiments were noticed and followed with interest and encouragement by Joel. This first email I have from him, I would find out later, is characteristic of the way he encouraged everyone in their curiosity, no matter who they were: zero consideration given to whether a person had impressive credentials or whatever.

Joel noticed every plant that grew on the land here. His extremely consistent practice of observation was a great teacher to me––and in particular, combined with the generosity with which he shared all he learned, is one of the best demonstrations of love in action that I have encountered in my life.

Most days, toward the end of the day, Joel would emerge from the archive for a late afternoon walk through the garden to look at stuff. I still expect to see him toward the end of my workday walking around with his camera around his neck, checking everything out.  On my luckier days, his walk would pass by wherever in the garden I was working, and we would have a chat. These chats consisted almost exclusively of gossip about the plants in the garden: how everything is doing, what’s in bloom, what has seeds, what is struggling and why, what plants would be good to collect from various places, interesting tidbits about this or that plant, how to grow them, where they are found in the wild, varying relationships to specific plants in different cultures, etc. But in particular,  Joel would communicate his very strong opinions about how and what we were growing around the garden, always with suggestions of what would be good to add. Always, always encouraging every gardener to continue experimenting with the plants listed in the Bartram family catalogues and restore the garden here to the bastion of diversity and deep horticultural prowess and botanical research that it was during the period when the Bartrams tended it.

I was lucky enough to be allowed to accompany Joel and other botanist friends on plant adventures: days of going out and about to observe the intricate details about the way plants relate to various soils and to each other. This is how he showed me how to think about the garden here at Bartram’s Garden and how to embody the spirit of an ecological gardener.

Another way that Joel embodied the botanical curiosity of the Bartram-era Garden was how he would collect seeds during his time out studying various landscapes. Any time he traveled to give a lecture or attend a conference, he brought seeds back for the gardeners here to grow: plastic baggies with the scientific name of the plant and the place where he collected them. He wanted us to try to grow everything and anything.

A couple of the very special plants that we have in the garden here that are a result of this relationship are Hibiscus laevis and Oenothera grandiflora, which Joel collected in the Tensaw River Valley on a trip to the Bartram Trail Conference in 2007.

Joel collected the Hibiscus laevis, or Halberd-Leaved Hibiscus, seed we grow here at the Garden near the Tensaw River, where he saw the plant growing in a bald cypress swamp. He was very excited for us to bring it back to the Garden, as he knew that a seed packet of this plant from 1800 was found in the Woodlands mansion, identified in William Bartram’s handwriting. The plant had been offered for sale through the Bartram nursery as early as 1807 under the name Hibiscus militaris so it is cool to offer fresh seed of the plant each year in our Welcome Center today.

Of Oenothera grandiflora, he wrote in 2008 in The Traveller:

a plant of William Bartram’s “most pompous and brilliant herbaceous plant,” the golden evening-primrose or Oenothera grandiflora, was brought from near Stockton, Alabama, to Bartram’s Garden in Philadelphia. The root quite happily survived the winter and has been growing immense all summer. There are now probably a dozen stems, five to six feet tall. In spite of the luxuriant growth, only in the last week of August has it begun to form flower buds, with the first opening on August 27th. With the stock of developing buds, it looks like it will soon be flowering in abundance. I’m not sure if the rather late bloom time is natural for this species, or the result of drought from mid-summer onward, or repeated attacks by Japanese beetles. During July it was possible to pull handfuls of beetles off the plant daily. The plant survived the period with riddled leaves, but continued to grow.

He further wrote, “What we are most hoping is that it will produce a lot of seed so we can be sure to continue William’s evening primrose here in future and distribute some seed.” Joel wrote an essay about this plant, and in particular William Bartram’s first encounter with it in 1775 and his enraptured interest in it, in Fields of Vision: Essays on the Travels of William Bartram edited by Kathryn Braund and Charlotte Porter. We still grow the offspring of the specimen Joel collected in the Garden today and offer its seeds for sale through the Welcome Center.

Another example of how Joel championed the sharing of seeds was the Franklinia altamaha. Especially in this day and age, when most people are starting to grow the much more easily cultivated Gordlinia hybrid, Joel adamantly encouraged us to commit ourselves to embracing the mysteries of cultivating Franklinia. He watched carefully the many failures and few successes people had with this shrub and formed a hypothesis that Franklinia is reliant on some particular mycorrhizal association. Joel followed up for many years with people interested in a one-year Franklinia census made in 2000 by Longwood Garden that tracked those who were cultivating the plant. The census attracts attention even to this day, and Joel often sent seeds from the garden here to many people who get in touch seeking information on how to grow the mysterious plant, once again, encouraging all curious seekers.

In recent years, Joel was sending the immature embryos from the fruit of Franklinias at Bartram’s Garden to PhD candidate Heather Gladfelter at the University of Georgia for her use putting them into tissue culture for propagation and studying their genetic diversity. He also encouraged me to send her the immature seeds of the Franklinias at Horticultural Hall in West Fairmount Park, as he pointed out that these trees, being planted by the Meehan brothers in that location for the Centennial Exhibition, are likely the most direct living descendants of the plants propagated from wild seed by the Bartrams.

At the time of his illness, I asked Joel what writing he is most proud of and he said it was the new chapter on Franklinia he had published in 2022 in The Attention of a Traveller edited by Kathryn Braund. It is indeed a beautifully detailed piece of research and an in-depth view of the history of the Franklinia tree. I believe this bit of writing is a taste of the deep writing about plants, building on his decades of research, that Joel would have continued if he had been given the time.

Another piece of research that resulted in publication was Joel’s intense study of Narcissus in the Garden. He tracked and studied the different varieties of Narcissus here over years, eventually creating a map of their locations in the garden in 2013, which was contributed to the 2015 book, Daffodils in American Gardens, 1733-1940 by Sara L. Van Beck. Through his research and the long correspondence with Sara Van Beck, Joel identified several very old cultivars of Narcissus here, potentially dating their planting to the antebellum period of the garden when Andrew Eastwick employed Thomas Meehan here as his Head Gardener, and perhaps some varieties from even earlier.

Joel’s study of the Narcissus varieties in the garden led him to encourage our proper cultivation of these relics. He encouraged us to transplant the overgrown clumps to encourage better flowering and to continue the theme of daffodil-lined paths from the Meehan-period garden, observable in photographs. Joel emailed me care manuals, encouraging me to collect wood ash for their proper fertilization. All of this, and his staunch insistence on delaying the mowing of spring lawns until the decay of the bulb foliage, has resulted in definitively more spectacular bloom displays in the spring––weather permitting!

Joel did extensive research into the plant catalogs published by the Bartram nursery throughout its history and into the letters, writings, and notes of the literate family members to create an extensive plant list spanning their three generations that we still use as the curated plant list that guides our collections in the botanical garden here. Each of these plants of course can be considered and studied from so many perspectives: ecological, economic, and cultural. Though the plant list is derived from the limited source of the Bartram family’s writings, that limitation only spurs a curious gardener on to numerous and infinite stories that one could tell about any particular plant. Joel was interested in all of that.

I could go on and on about Joel’s expansive research into particular plants related to the history here. I could spend multiple lifetimes horticulturally interpreting Joel’s  emails and articles regarding innumerable plants: mosses, rhododendrons, tea, hawthorne, rhubarb, his work with Nancy Wygant on indexing plant names in John Bartram’s correspondence, their work on William Bartram’s list of agricultural crops from this region, their research exploring dahlia cultivars of the Ann Bartram Carr period, their study of illustrations from Lodigge’s Botanical Cabinet to identify specific Camellia varieties for the re-establishment of the Ann Bartram Carr Garden, Joel’s writing on North American medicinal plants as written about by John Bartram, and so much more. All this as well as Joel’s extensive work on interpretive plans for the Garden can all be referred to over the long run. I believe that Joel’s research can and will inspire many generations of gardeners here at Bartram’s Garden and beyond.

I’m so grateful to my colleague Aseel Rasheed for taking decisive action to bring Joel to the hospital during his short illness. It allowed many of us to have final conversations with Joel. My last conversations with him are very special to me: and keeping with the theme of our relationship, we mostly discussed plants and the Garden during those visits. The most remarkable thing I take away from those visits was his candor, which was relatively unfazed by what must have been incredible physical discomfort. Joel seemed to be observing the experience almost objectively and with detached interest, a true scientist to the last.

And he seemed to really enjoy chatting about the Garden at that time. At the time of these visits, spring was opening up, and it seemed impossible to me that he was not able to be in the Garden for the ritual parade of phenology which marked our days in common. I decided to bring him bouquets of whatever was blooming on the day of the hospital visit. I loved how he could look through the bouquet and could say where each bloom had come from: one sweet example was a bloom from a strange crabapple that randomly placed itself deep in the border along the back path of the Wilderness Garden that always surprises me there with its spectacular early blooms. He said, “Is this that weird crabapple from the back path?”

He repeatedly asked for hyacinths, as he was a great lover of fragrance in gardens, though the hyacinths didn’t bloom in earnest until the days following his death.

During my last visit before Joel’s death, I asked him about what plants he would want for a new garden in his memory––“Joel’s evergreen grove” was the prompt I suggested. With almost no hesitation, here is the plant list he rattled off for the garden: two- and three-needle pines, loblolly pines, rhododendrons, kalmia, bear oak, blackjack oak, lilies lady slippers, wintergreen, trailing arbutus, grasses, and dwarf conifers. He also added, “Plant two of everything because one will die”––an interesting Joel-like adaptation of John Bartram’s quest to collect two of everything!

I am looking forward to planting this garden in Joel’s memory in the coming years, though in truth, the entire Garden for me is touched with his memory. I think of his words and observation––his careful noticing––in every corner of the land here.

Recently, the folks at the Woodlands wrote to ask if we had any opinions about bulbs that would be appropriate for planting at Joel’s gravesite. I’m so much looking forward to collaborations with Robin Rick, the gardener over at the Woodlands, to find ways to recall Joel’s story through plants. I suggested it would be special if we could dig some of the very old daffodil bulbs from Bartram’s Garden to transplant them at Joel’s gravesite as he was so intensely interested in the daffodils here. Robin also suggested that bulbs might be used to mark areas of Joel’s archeological research at the Woodlands, where there is a little more sun.

A small group of the Garden’s staff joined our friends at the Woodlands to plant bulbs for Joel at his gravesite in Fall 2023. We had a long list of possible favorites to include: some of the double ‘Telemonious Plenus’, the double ‘Sulphur Pheonix’, and ‘Emperor’ daffodils, and he also really looked forward to Narcissus poeticus recurvus each year. But then other possibilities kept emerging, like Claytonia tuberosus (spring beauty), Eranthis hyemale (winter aconite), Galanthus nivalis ‘flore pleno’ (double snowdrops), Sanguinarea canadensis (bloodroot), Hepatica nobilis var japonica ‘flore pleno’ (double Japanese hepatica) to honor Joel’s Japanophilia, fragrant hyacinths, and the species tulip, Tullipa sylvestris, because it’s long-lived without any maintenance, strange and twisty, and still grows in the vacant lot near where John Bartram is buried.

Mandy Katz is Lead Gardener and Land Manager at Bartram’s Garden.

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Register by November 7!

In partnership with TreePhilly and the ROOTS Tree Crew, sign-ups are now available to receive free trees for residents of the 19143 and 19142 zip codes. Priority for neighbors between 49th Street and 65th Street.

Trees will be available for pick-up at Connell Park, 6401 Elmwood Ave, on Saturday, November 11. 

Click here to register for a tree in 19143 or 19142.

Other details:

• You may request up to two trees per planting address. To request a second tree, submit the form and re-fill it out again for the second tree.  Trees are available while supplies last. Seeking more trees for a special project? Email info@treephilly.org.
• Trees are available for Philadelphia residents only and must be planted in the ground (not in a pot) on private property in the city of Philadelphia. Residents are responsible for the care of the tree and may receive a maximum of 6 total trees per address. For more information on caring for your new tree, visit FAQ PAGE.
• For information on getting a free tree to plant in yards in other parts of the city, go to TreePhilly.org.
• To sign up for a free street tree planted between the sidewalk and the street, go HERE.

TreePhilly is a program of Philadelphia Parks and Recreation in partnership with the Fairmount Park Conservancy.

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Click here to check out the plant catalog for a full list of seasonally available plants and to explore highlights selected by the growers at Bartram’s Garden and the Sankofa Community Farm at Bartram’s Garden.

Need guidance from our gardeners? Join us for SpringFest on Saturday, April 15, to shop for plants with input from our expert staff and also enjoy a day of free outdoor fun for the whole family.

PLEASE NOTE: To make sure that your garden is as healthy as possible, plants will be available for sale only when seasonally appropriate. More plants will be offered as the season continues, and not all plants in this catalog will be available at the same time. If you have questions about when to purchase a particular plant, please let us know.

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Ailanthus altissima is native to Taiwan and central China but was introduced to Europe by way of a Jesuit Priest named Pierre Nicolas d’Incarville, who sent seeds to Paris from Beijing in 1743. A few years later Peter Collinson, the English botanist and close correspondent of John Bartram, acquired some seeds from France that he grew in his garden in London. Although it is difficult to imagine given its noxious qualities today, eighteenth century botanists held Ailanthus in high regard, admiring its foliage, its perceived exoticism, and its toleration of urban environments. By the 1780s, it was a favorite in gardens across Europe and was widely planted in London and Paris, and it remained heavily used in urban landscaping through the nineteenth century.[2]

Foliage of Ailanthus altissima, the Tree-of-Heaven. Credit: Wikimedia commons.

Most sources credit Ailanthus’s introduction to America to William Hamilton, who maintained a botanical garden just about a mile up the Schuylkill of the Bartrams, at The Woodlands. Hamilton reportedly had Ailanthus seeds sent to his garden around 1784. But twenty years earlier, in 1764, John Bartram writes a letter to Peter Collinson where he describes the growth of a certain sumac species in his greenhouse:

“last summer there came up in my greenhouse from east India seed formerly sowed there an odd kind of Sumach (as I take it to be)   it growed in A few months near 4 foot high & continued green & growing all winter & this spring I planted it out to take its chance   it shoots vigorously & allmost as red as crimson”[3]

Most signs point to this plant being Ailanthus. The tree’s fast growth, hardiness in the winter, and red shoots are all characteristic of Ailanthus. The species is still sometimes referred to today as a sumac, although taxonomically it is no longer a member of the sumac genus. At the time the sumac genus, Rhus, included many different trees and shrubs with alternate compound leaves, like Ailanthus does. John Bartram would have been aware of all of the American sumac species, so if he is correct in recalling that he planted this from seeds brought from Asia (East India), then this very well could be the earliest recorded instance of Ailanthus in the Americas.

Peter Collinson, who was one of the first in Britain to receive Ailanthus via France, certainly thought that John Bartram had one in his greenhouse. He replied, describing his own plant:

“I have from China a Tree of surprising growth that much resembles a Sumach which is the Admiration of all that see it  Phaps thine may be the same—It Endours all our Winters   Thou Sayes thine came from the East but mentions not what Country: We call ours the Varnish Tree”[4]

The name “Varnish tree” refers to at least four different species of tree from Asia, and the 1750s saw intense taxonomical debate within the pages of the Royal Society of London’s Philosophical Transactions attempting to distinguish the different plants referred to by that name. English botanists were fixated on the so-called varnish tree because some species, like the Chinese Lacquer Tree or Japanese Wax Tree, had sap that could be turned into lacquer, a highly valuable substance that could be used for coating wooden furniture or artwork.[5]

Ailanthus is similar to these species and became caught up in the craze over Varnish trees, and d’Incarville may have originally sent seeds of it back to Europe because he mistook it for one of those species. Upon receiving the seeds, English botanists quickly realized that they had several different species. John Ellis published a paper in Philosophical Transactions that distinguished a “Varnish tree” specimen found growing at two botanical gardens in London from other Rhus species, including a diagram that is the earliest botanical sketch of the plant.[6] To the dismay of botanists, this species did not have useful sap, although it was well-regarded aesthetically. Phillip Miller gives it the name “altissimum” in his Gardener’s Dictionary in 1768, and the tree was finally defined in its own genus, Ailanthus, by the French botanist René Louiche Desfontaine in 1788.[7]

The English botanist John Ellis used this drawing to argue that the “Chinese Varnish Tree” (figure 5) should be its own species. That plant later became Ailanthus altissima. Credit: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.

But at the time John Bartram and Peter Collinson were looking at this curious tree from China, botanists still would have thought of Ailanthus as a type of Varnish Tree belonging to the sumac (Rhus) genus. Collinson described his Varnish tree as a “stately tree sent over raised from seed sent over from Nankin in China, in 1751, sent over by Father d’Incarville, my correspondent in China.”[8] This account lines up perfectly with John Ellis’s description of his new Rhus species, which modern botanists consider to be a description of Ailanthus.

Identifying plants from the historical record is never a straightforward task, and we cannot say for sure that Bartram’s tree was an Ailanthus without having a more detailed description or drawing of it. We can only speculate. Genetic research has suggested, however, that Ailanthus was indeed first introduced to North America through the Philadelphia area at the end of the eighteenth century, making either Hamilton or Bartram possible candidates for its introduction.[9] Bartram does not mention this plant again, so perhaps it died at some point and has no relation to the Ailanthus trees that are now widespread across the area. But given the tree’s propensity to spread and take root in even extreme conditions, it is not out of the question that it escaped Bartram’s greenhouse and later became naturalized in the region.

We have a few more references to Ailanthus from the years that Robert Carr was proprietor of the garden. Ailanthus appears in Robert Carr’s catalogue from 1828 as an exotic tree, priced at $1 compared to the 25¢ or 50¢ that most trees sold for.[10] In 1844, one of Robert Carr’s correspondents recalls an Ailanthus tree that was apparently given to Ann Bartram Carr as a wedding present in 1809. That tree was supposedly procured from Hamilton’s garden at The Woodlands and was still preserved at Bartram’s in 1844.[11] Both references point to Ailanthus not being widespread in Philadelphia in the early 19^th century, but they do not rule out an earlier introduction during John Bartram’s lifetime.

Perhaps John Bartram, not William Hamilton, deserves the dubious designation of being the first to introduce Ailanthus to the Americas. We can only imagine what John Bartram would think if he saw what the little plant he found in his greenhouse in 1764 was up to today.

Notes

Cover image: Sketch of Ailanthus leaves by John Ellis, published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in 1758.

[1] Patricia J. Wynne, “Ailanthus altissima”, Columbia Introduced Species Project, December 9, 2002.

[2] Shiu Ying Hu, “Ailanthus”, Arnoldia, 1979, 39(2): 29-50.

[3] John Bartram, Letter to Peter Collinson, May 1^st, 1764; in The Correspondence of John Bartram, 1734-1777, ed. Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy Smith Berkeley (University of Florida Press, 1992).

[4] Peter Collinson, Letter to John Bartram, June 1^st, 1764; in The Correspondence, ed. Berkeley & Berkeley.

[5] The Chinese Lacquer Tree is now Toxicodendron vernicifluum while the Japanese Wax Tree is now Toxicodendron succedaneum. Each of these species were considered part of the Rhus (sumac) genus at the time.

[6] John Ellis, “CXII. A letter from Mr. John Ellis, F. R. S. to Philip Carteret Webb, Esq; F. R. S. attempting to ascertain the tree that yields the common varnish used in China and Japan; to promote Its propagation in our American Colonies; and to set right some mistakes botanists appear to have entertained concerning It,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 49, (1755), pp. 866-876.

[7] Walter T. Swingle, “The early European history and the botanical name of the Tree of Heaven, Ailanthus altissima,” Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, Vol. 6, No. 14 (1916), pp. 490-498

[8] Peter Collinson, published in Hortus Collinsonianus: An account of the plants cultivated by the late Peter Collinson, compiled by Lewis Weston Dillwyn in 1843. Not published, printed in Swansea by W. C. Murray and D. Rees. Dillwyn believed that what Collinson thought was the Chinese Varnish Tree was actually Ellis’s new species, and cites his article in the Philosophical Transactions to support this.

[9] Preston R. Aldrich, Joseph S. Briguglio, Shyam N. Kapadia, Minesh U. Morker, Ankit Rawal, Preeti Kalra, Cynthia D. Huebner, and Gary K. Greer, “Genetic Structure of the Invasive Tree Ailanthus altissima in Eastern United States Cities,” Journal of Botany, vol. 2010.

[10] Robert Carr, Periodical Catalogue of Fruit and Ornamental Trees and Shrubs, Green House Plants, &c. Cultivated and for Sale at Bartram’s Botanic Garden, Kingsessing, Near Gray’s Ferry—Four miles from Philadelphia. Russell and Martien, Philadelphia, 1828, p. 21

[11] Dr. Steph. Browne to Col. Robert Carr, September 19, 1844, Society Misc. Coll, Box 7-B, Of644, 1842K, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

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From the start, medicine in the colonies was markedly different from practices in Europe. Formally trained physicians already had a dubious reputation in Europe and were only scarcer and more expensive in the Americas, and their imported medicines were constantly in short supply. Medical science was, at best, imprecise, and at worst actively harmful to patients who came down with sickness. Most care was instead outsourced to apothecaries, who stocked their shelves with plants not native to the Americas and concocted recipes used to treat all sorts of ailments, from common colds to venereal diseases to tropical diseases like yellow fever. And without any knowledge of the strange and new plants they encountered in the region, apothecaries and commoners alike often turned to Indigenous people for care or otherwise sought cures from their medical botanicals.[1]

Needless to say, the often-improvised reality of medical treatment in America did not conform to the theories of the country’s most-remembered physicians. Two prominent Philadelphia physicians, Dr. Benjamin Rush and Dr. Benjamin Smith Barton, wrote treatises that attempted to organize this rudimentary system of medical treatment, but generally excluded the original context that the remedies they described were discovered within. Those physicians had an economic incentive to appropriate Indigenous remedies while simultaneously disavowing their usage by Indigenous healers, since they would have competed directly with them for patients.[2] As a result, the contributions that Indigenous botanical knowledge made to early American medicine is usually underemphasized, but the writings of William Bartram preserve some of that history.[3]

Recent scholarship has suggested we should understand early American medicine as part of a distinctive “Atlantic World medical complex” which “melded people, plants, and knowledges” from Indigenous, African, and European sources.[4] Cures from Europe were widely used in this context, but so too were remedies that had their roots in the medical systems of the Lenape or Cherokee, and remedies that reached Euro-Americans through the African diaspora.[5] By tracing references William Bartram makes to Indigenous medical botany in his writings, we can reconstruct the Indigenous roots of early American medicine that have been left out of the record by authors like Barton and Rush. Bartram’s journey across the lands of the Creek and Cherokee in the southeastern part of the country, published in his literary classic Travels and other correspondences, offers a rich look into the medicinal world of those groups:

Indigenous Medical Botanicals described by William Bartram [6]

* Indicates a plant that was included in Bartram’s 1807 catalogue of plants at the garden.

Unlike other writers, Bartram’s ethnographic interest in Indigenous societies led him to record the cultural context that many of these remedies were used in. Euro-American physicians sometimes shared an interest in the specific properties of plants, but Bartram’s commitment to describing the rituals associated with medicine reveals the contours of Indigenous medical systems.[7] The Creek and Cherokee did not confine their treatments to remedies alone, for instance, but usually combined them with “regimen and a rigid abstinence with respect to eating and drinking, as well as the gratification of other passions & appetites.”[8] Sometimes, Bartram describes the preparation of different plants, for example how the China Brier and Sassafras root were combined with cuttings from the Bignonia crucigera vine and boiled to produce what he calls a “Diet Drink.”[9] An infusion of the tops of Collinsonia was “ordinarily drunk at breakfast” and unlike most medicines, this one was of “exceeding pleasant taste and flavor.”

Elsewhere, he recounts the processes the Creek and Cherokee underwent to turn plants into medicines. Podophyllum peltatum, the May-Apple, which Bartram described as “the most effectual and safe emetic and cathartic,” was prepared through digging up the roots in Autumn, drying them in a loft, and reducing them into a “fine sieved powder” that could then be used as medicine.[10]

William Bartram’s illustration of Collinsonia canadensis, horse-balm, ca. 1801-1802. Both John and William Bartram held Collinsonia in high regard as a febrifuge. [Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society.]

At the time the town was fasting, taking medicine, and I think I may say praying, to avert a grievous calamity of sickness, which had lately afflicted them, and laid in the grave abundance of their citizens; they fast seven or eight days, during which time they eat or drink nothing but a meagre gruel, made of a little corn-flour and water; taking at the same time by way of medicine or physic, a strong decoction of the roots of the Iris versicolor, which is a powerful cathartic; they hold this root in high estimation, every town cultivates a little plantation of it, having a large artificial pond, just without the town, planted and almost overgrown with it, where they usually dig clay for pottery, and mortar and plaster for buildings, and I observed where they had lately been digging up this root.[11]

Medical texts might list Iris versicolor as a cathartic, but they would not list its role as part of a complex procedure for staving off sickness that Bartram describes. We cannot determine from this description if this medical ritual was replicated across the region, but the fact that “every town” would “cultivate a little plantation of it” indicates that it was among the most important medicinal plants to the Creek and likely carried strong symbolic significance.

The transfer of medicinal knowledge was not always a frictionless process. Indigenous people were acutely aware of the dangers posed by Euro-American settlers in this period, and in one case Bartram recalls the Cherokee nation withholding medicinal information from him:

The Cherokees use the Lobelia siphilitica & another plant of still greater power and efficacy, which the traders told me of, but would not undertake to show it to me under Thirty Guineas Reward for fear of the Indians who endeavor to conceal the knowledge of it from the whites lest its great virtues should excite their researches for it, to its expiration.[12]

Still, William Bartram lists at least four remedies that became widespread among white settlers after being described to them by the Indigenous inhabitants of the region, and as mentioned earlier, white settlers often turned to Indigenous doctors for care.

Two plants that Bartram held in particularly high regard were the Swamp Lily (Saururus cernuus) and the mayapple, (Podophyllum peltatum), the latter of which he attributed to preserving “the lives of many thousands of people of the Southern states.”[13] Bartram himself wrote that he had been treated with it and attested to its “almost infallible good effects”. The mayapple, known as highly toxic both to Europeans and Lenape people in the Northeast, was used by the Cherokee and Creek to expel worms, and as an emetic (to induce vomiting), and a cathartic (a laxative).[14] Swamp Lily could be used to treat wounds or fight fevers. The virtues of both plants, Bartram recounts, “were communicated to the White inhabitants by the Indians.”[15] Etoposide, a chemical derived from Podophyllum peltatum, remains a widely used medicine in chemotherapy treatments today.[16]

William Bartram’s drawings medical botanicals were renowned for their accuracy and beauty. Members of the American Philosophical Society commissioned drawings of his plants for their research. This drawing is of Podophyllum peltatum, the mayapple, ca. 1801-1803. [Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society.]

William Bartram’s writings contributed to both the preservation and appropriation of Indigenous medical knowledge. In a very direct sense, the Bartrams commodified and perhaps profited off of the Indigenous cures they encountered. But William Bartram’s writings also preserved the Indigenous roots of early American medicine, when other sources have obscured or willfully suppressed them. William’s expeditions and careful observations of Indigenous medicine made Bartram’s Garden into an important node in the transatlantic exchange of medicinal knowledge and reveal the global and contested roots of modern medical science.

Notes

Cover image: William Bartram’s drawing of Silphium terebinthinaceum, rosinweed, engraved for publication in B. S. Barton’s Elements of Botany,  Philadelphia: 1803.

[1] Ray, Laura E. “Podophyllum peltatum and observations on the Creek and Cherokee Indians: William Bartram’s preservation of Native American pharmacology.” The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine. vol. 82,1 (2009), 31.

[2] McCulla, Theresa. “Medicine in Colonial North America,” Colonial North America at Harvard Library Project, 2017.

[3] Ray, “Podophyllum peltatum,” 29. Ray has shown how Barton’s writings borrowed or even plagiarized many of William Bartram’s observations on medicine in his Collections for an Essay towards a Materia Medica of the United-States, omitting reference to the Indigenous context that Bartram found his plants in. Rush openly dismissed the idea that Indigenous sources could offer anything to Euro-American physicians, writing that “we have no discoveries in the materia medica to hope for from the Indians in North-America” (Cited in Robinson, “New Worlds, New Medicines”).

[4] Schiebinger, Londa L. Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017), 3.

[5] See our blog post on Cleome gynandra, an African plant that William Bartram found in Louisiana.

[6] This table compiles descriptions from four sources:

Bartram, William. “Observations on the Creek and Cherokee Indians.” In William Bartram on the Southeastern Indians, ed. Gregory A Waselkov and Kathryn E. Holland Braund, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995),161-164.

—The Travels of William Bartram, Naturalists Edition, annotated by Francis Harper, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), 207-288.

—Travels in Georgia and Florida, 1773-1774: A Report to Dr. John Fothergill, annotated by Francis Harper, (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1943).

— “William Bartram’s ‘Remarks’ descriptive specimens he sent to Dr. Fothergill and Mr. Barclay,” 1774, in William Bartram: Botanical and Zoological Drawings, 1756-1788, ed. Joseph Ewan (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1968), 154-168.

[7] Robinson, Martha. “New Worlds, New Medicines: Indian Remedies and English Medicine in Early America,” Early American Studies, vol. 3,1 (2005), 97.

[8] Bartram, Observations, 162.

[9] Bartram, Observations, 163.

[10] Ibid., 163. [Podophyllum or mayapple can be fatally poisonous, do not try this at home.]

[11] Bartram, Travels, 276.

[12] Bartram, Observations, 163.

[13] Ibid., 163.

[14] The Pennsylvania Moravian missionary John Heckewelder (1743-1823), who spent years writing about the Lenape, includes the May-Apple on his list of their medical botanicals, but only references its toxicity. John Gottlieb E. Heckewelder, Names of various trees, shrubs & plants in the language of the Lenape. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1815)

[15] Ibid., 164.

[16] The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, “Etoposide”. Reviewed on Jun 29, 2021. Drugs.com, https://www.drugs.com/monograph/etoposide.html.

[17] Many of these plants are still cultivated at the garden today. These include Angelica atropurpurea, Bignonia capreolata, Collinsonia canadensis, Erigeron pulchellus, Ilex vomitoria, Iris versicolor, Panax quinquefolius, Persea borbonia, Saururus cernuus, Silphium terebinthinaceum, and Spigelia marilandica.

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Silk’s importance to the early modern economy cannot be understated. Elites in Europe had long preferred silk garb, leading Britain and France to develop highly profitable silk weaving industries by the early 1700s.[1] Gathering raw silk from silkworms, however, proved much more difficult. Growers in Spain and Italy had some success raising silkworms, but most raw silk used in Britain and its colonies was imported from Asia, which along with tea and porcelain, formed the bulk of the East India Company’s lucrative China trade.[2]

The British were fascinated by the possibility of producing raw silk domestically. King James I developed a plan for growing silk in the Virginia colony as early as 1609. [3] They imported Morus alba trees in pursuit of this project, but the trees quickly escaped cultivation, becoming widespread in the countryside and hybridizing with native red and black mulberry trees. John Bartram reported M. alba growing wild in local forests by the 1750s.[4] The American silk industry never took off as tobacco and cotton were far more lucrative for most farmers. Still, the idea would continue to circulate in the colonies throughout the eighteenth century.

An illustration of the white mulberry tree (Morus alba).

The Bartrams were aware of these experiments in raising silkworms. In 1743, John Bartram received word from the naturalist and politician from New York, Cadwallader Colden, about the governor of Connecticut who was “cloathed in a good handsom Silk of his own making” and had plans to produce one hundred more yards of silk later in the year. Bartram replied and informed Colden of a previous misadventure in silkworm production:

Severall in our province made an attempt to raise Silk about 16 or 18 year ago but the trouble in raising the worms & winding the silk Soon discouraged them & the persons that was the most eager to promote it hath since found a greater profit in raising Hemp & Tobaco so that now we have no inclination to try any farther experiments of the Silk worms notwithstanding our plantations is full of mulberry trees… But if our Neibouring colonys should Succeed its very Likely Some would make another tryall[5]

Despite the failure described by Bartram, the allure of silkworms remained and further trials were indeed attempted. Bartram recognized that the “mighty Monarchs of China” became “so rich and their Princes So Powerfull” through raising silkworms.[6] Silk production would continue in Connecticut over the next few decades, and in the 1760s it piqued the interest of Benjamin Franklin, who organized the immigration of silk workers from England to Pennsylvania. Soon, Pennsylvania and its neighboring states had fledgling silk industries.[7]

The Bartrams enter the story of American silk production again a few years later. John’s son, Moses Bartram, evidently took an interest in collecting silk from native silkworms and experimented with raising them himself. He prepared his observations and delivered them to the American Philosophical Society in 1768. In his remarks, Moses describes capturing five cocoons from local moths in 1766, which gradually hatched and produced moths that laid some three hundred eggs.[8]

The following spring, Moses set to work raising the silkworms. He placed them in glass bottles, put the bottles in the shade to shield the worms from the heat, and filled the bottles with water and vegetables. Moses tried feeding them mulberry leaves, which his native worms apparently did not appreciate, instead preferring to graze on local vegetables (especially apple tree leaves). He wrote down his observations on the worms every week, recording their habits—they crawled down from their perches to “drink heartily two or three times a day”—and their life cycle. By August 10th, they were all wrapped up in cocoons again, where they would wait to emerge next year.

Moses did not report trying to extract silk from the cocoons. He likely did not know how or did not have the instruments to do so. But he hoped that his experiments would reveal how silkworms could be “raised to advantage, and perhaps, in time, become no contemptible branch of commerce,” and compared his worms favorably to those from the East.

Moses Bartram likely raised polyphemus moths, (Antheraea polyphemus) which can still be found at the garden today, like this one spotted a few years ago.

The Bartrams’ experiments with silk production were not over. In spring 1771, we have evidence that Elizabeth Bartram, daughter of John, younger sister of Moses, and William Bartram’s twin, was raising silkworms at their home. John writes to Franklin to inform him of this development, saying that she “hath saved several thousands of eggs of silkworms which she expects will hatch in A few days… she intends to give them A fair tryal this spring.” Franklin was delighted to hear this and replied, wishing her success, adding that “nothing is wanting to our country for the produce of silk, but skill; which will be obtained by persevering till we are instructed by experience.”[9] We know little of what happened to Elizabeth’s experiment in raising silkworms, but they may have been grown in bins in a room attached to the kitchen at the Bartram home in Kingsessing.

Why did silk production not take off in America despite many colonists’ best efforts? Franklin was right that acquiring the skill to grow silkworms was a major obstacle to building a silk industry in America, but there was an even bigger barrier: labor. Raising silkworms was notoriously labor-intensive. Silkworms have to feed for weeks. Once they spin their cocoons, the silkworms are boiled, their cocoons extracted, and then wound on a reel to produce usable fiber. More than two thousand silkworms are required to produce just one pound of silk.

In the American colonies, which were sparsely populated compared to Europe, to say nothing of China and India, finding enough labor to produce a competitive silk industry was a challenge that proved impossible to overcome. Pehr Kalm, a Swedish botanist and traveler who worked under Linnaeus and visited John Bartram, recognized this issue. In his treatise on North American mulberry trees, he commented that “the country was so sparsely inhabited,” that it would be “utterly useless to engage in silkworm culture and the additional work of spinning the silk.”[10] Countless other crops turned a far greater profit, and flax, hemp, and cotton could produce any fibers the colonists needed with far less effort.

Experiments with silk would continue. Around the Revolution, a “silk craze” and swept over the nation as people “gave themselves over completely to the cultivating of silk.”[11] That craze was evident during William Bartram’s travels across the southeastern states, where he describes encountering “a large orchard of the European Mulberry trees (Morus alba), some of which were grafted on stocks of the native Mulberry (Morus rubra) these trees were cultivated for the purpose of feeding silk-worms (phalaena bombyca).[12]

Growers were caught up in a similar craze in the 1830s, when thousands scrambled to buy the recently introduced “Chinese Mulberry” (Morus multicaulis).[13] Like previous experiments, these attempts at raising silkworms domestically could not produce silk efficiently enough and did not amount to much, except a bubble and bust in the nursery trade. Eventually, however, the refining of raw silk became a major industry in the United States. By the end of the nineteenth century silk mills (usually relying on imported raw silk from Japan) popped up all over the country, and in 1920 the silk industry had become the largest industry in Pennsylvania. Silk was a dominant industry in the Eastern states until World War II, when wartime interruptions on imported silk and new synthetic fibers gradually made it obsolete.

White mulberry trees still grow at Bartram’s Garden today, like this one growing just in front of the Bartram house. Photograph by Gabriel Morbeck.

White mulberries remained in the Bartram catalogue for years after their attempts at raising silkworms. In the 1828 catalogue, mulberries are listed available as “small trees of the white Italian or Persian Mulberry, for Silk-worms.”[14] Robert Carr, then the proprietor of the garden, took out an advertisement for the garden’s stock of M. muticaulis in a Delaware County newspaper in 1838. These sales would have undoubtedly enticed the countless ordinary people who hitched their fortunes (and their labor) to dreams of silk cultivation.  White mulberries remain widespread around Philadelphia, a reminder of this intriguing piece of our region’s history.

Notes

Cover image: title page from Moses Bartram’s article in the Transactions of the APS.

[1]  Leanna Lee-Whitman, “The Silk Trade: Chinese Silks and the British East India Company,” Winterthur Portfolio, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Spring, 1982), pp. 21-41

[2] Ronald C. Po, “Tea, Porcelain, and Silk: Chinese Exports to the West in the Early Modern Period,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History. (Oxford University Press: 2018).

[3] Cora E. Lutz, “Ezra Stiles and the Culture of Silk in Connecticut,” The Yale University Library Gazette, Vol. 58, No. 3/4 (April 1984), pp. 143-149

[4] Esther Louise Larsen and Pehr Kalm. “Pehr Kalm’s Description of the North American Mulberry Tree.” Agricultural History Vol. 24, No. 4 (Oct., 1950), pp. 221-227

[5] John Bartram, Letter to Cadwallader Colden, September 17^th, 1743; in The Correspondence of John Bartram, 1734-1777, ed. Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy Smith Berkeley (University of Florida Press, 1992), p. 222.

[6] John Bartram, Letter to Colden.

[7] Lutz, “Ezra Stiles and the Culture of Silk in Connecticut”, 144.

[8] The domesticated silk moth, Bombyx mori, has not existed outside of human care for thousands of years, but dozens of its relatives are referred to as “silk moths” and make similar cocoons. Moses described the moth that hatched as a “large brown fly”, which could have been one of the Giant Silk Moths from the family Saturniidae, perhaps Antheraea polyphemus, the polyphemus moth.

[9] John Bartram, Letter to Benjamin Franklin, April 29th, 1771; and Franklin to Bartram, July 17, 1771; in The Correspondence of John Bartram. p. 739, 744. Elizabeth Bartram married William Wright, August 12, 1771 and moved to Conestoga on the Susquehanna in Lancaster County.

[10] Pehr Kalm, “Pehr Kalm’s Description of the North American Mulberry Tree.”

[11] Elizabeth Hall, “If Looms Could Speak: The Story of Pennsylvania’s Silk Industry,” Pennsylvania Heritage, Summer 2006.

[12] William Bartram, The Travels of William Bartram, Naturalists Edition, annotated by Francis Harper, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), p. 308.

[13] David Landry. “History of Silk Production,” Mansfield Historical Society, May 6, 2013. Botanists now consider M. multicaulis a variety of M. alba.

[14] Robert Carr, Periodical Catalogue of Frit and Ornamental Trees and Shrubs, Green House Plants &c. Cultivated and For Sale at Bartram’s Botanic Garden, Kingsessing, 1828. Provided through the Library of the New York Botanical Garden.

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Start with the Soil

Always start with the soil! Soil is where nutrients, water, and beneficial living organisms live and help plants thrive. First, learn more about your soil with a soil test from the local Penn State extension office. Visit here for instructions on where to bring or mail your soil sample. A general test costs $9–$10 and includes a pH and nutrient overview. It can also be wise to get include a heavy metal test for city soils.

The chemistry of pH dictates what nutrients are already available to the plant from the soil. A pH of 6–7 is suitable for a wide assortment of plants, but not all. The soil test results will also include some growing recommendations. Research what plants you are planning on growing and make sure those plants like the pH in your soil! Feel free to ask us at Bartram’s Garden for any plant suggestions from our nursery based on your results.

Add Compost and Mulch

In general, our city gardens appreciate compost, which increases nutrient retention and loosens up the soil. This helps our heavy rains drain through the soil and allows the plant roots to grow freely. There is free compost available for Philadelphia residents from the Fairmount Park Organic Recycling Center at 3850 Ford Road.

Another way to help your soil is mulching around the plants. Mulch comes in many shapes and sizes. Mulch suppresses weeds, keeps in moisture, and helps stabilize soil temperature. At the Garden, we use salt hay, leaf mulch, and wood chips for different areas of the garden. Wood chips are great for pathways, but they can also be used on garden beds. Leaf mulch is a delicious material for your garden beds. Apply two to three inches of mulch around plants, making sure not to bury the trunk if it is a tree or shrub.

And Stay Hydrated!

And of course, don’t forget to water your plants! All plants have different growing requirements, but during hot, dry weeks, many of our plants may need a drink. Watering your plants deeply but less frequently is the way to go. Deep waterings can help your plants have deeper roots. Water your plants at the base, not the leaves, so water droplets don’t heat up and scorch your leaves on sensitive plants. Morning watering is generally best because any water droplets dry off before it gets too hot, but water at the base no matter when you water!

Those are only a few gardening practices, but hopefully, those tips will set your garden on the right track! It may sound like a lot to learn about at first, but start small and build off of your successes! Happy gardening and have fun!

This article originally appeared in the Southwest Globe Times July 2022 print edition.

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Click here to check out the plant catalogue for a full list of seasonally available plants and to explore highlights selected by the growers at Bartram’s Garden and the Sankofa Community Farm at Bartram’s Garden.

The assemblage of highlighted plants is meant to help connect you to the spirit of the past, present, and future of these grounds and beyond. From plants that made these lands their home for centuries to crops that were brought over seas through trade or through the forced or voluntary movement of peoples, plants tell stories about who we have been, who we are, and who we can become. We are a place of many stories and we invite you to grow with us!

Need guidance from our gardeners? Join us for SpringFest on Saturday, April 16, to shop for plants with input from our expert staff and also enjoy a day of free outdoor fun for the whole family.

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Passages taken from “Franklinia alatamaha, A History of That “Very Curious” Shrub” by Joel T. Fry, in Bartram Broadside, Special Franklinia Edition, published by the John Bartram Association for the ‘noble & curious friends’ of Historic Bartram’s Garden (Winter 2000).

The Franklinia has long been shadowed by a closely related plant of the southern coastal plain, the Loblolly Bay or Gordonia lasianthus. The Loblolly Bay is locally common in the low wetlands of the southeastern coast of North America. It remains evergreen, and is not hardy much north of eastern North Carolina. Franklinia is still often confused with the more common Loblolly Bay. John Bartram was well aware of Loblolly Bay. It was in fact a plant he long desired. The English traveler, Mark Catesby had described and illustrated the plant in the first volume of his Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands published in London in 1730, as plate 44. And Bartram had a copy of this book, a gift from Catesby, in his library. Catesby’s book established the common name “Loblolly Bay.” He described the plant as “Alcea floridana quinque capsularis…” creating the pre-Linnaean scientific name of “Alcea floridana.”[1]

By 1765, the year he found Franklinia, John Bartram had experimented with the cultivation of the “Alcea” or Loblolly Bay in his garden for at least five years. He may have even been successful in getting it to flower prior to his trip to Georgia and Florida as King’s Botanist. John Bartram had first seen Loblolly Bay in the wild in the spring of 1760 when visiting his brother, Col. William Bartram at his plantation Ashwood, in Bladen Co., North Carolina. Bartram also traveled to Charleston, South Carolina at the same time to visit Alexander Garden. He probably first received plants of the “Alcea floridana” from either Garden or the Lambolls in

Charleston, latter in the fall of 1760. These first plants did not survive.

The next year John sent his son William to North Carolina to set up store as a merchant on his uncle’s Ashwood plantation. William Bartram lived at Ashwood from the spring of 1761 until the summer of 1765, and certainly became quite familiar with the plants of the local environment. His father wrote often requesting rare plants, especially the Loblolly Bay. In his first letter to William in the summer of 1761 Bartram reminded him, “the lobloly Bay or alcea

floridiana… grows up A little creek at ashwood….” In the fall he repeated “lobloly bay I cant have too much,” and again in December “the Alcea & the horse sugar I want much thay are very dificult to transplant I had them from Charlstown but thay are gone off perhaps your northern one may do better.”[2]

Through the early spring of 1762, John Bartram was still unsure if he had the “Alcea” or not. Writing Peter Collinson in May:

I am apt to think I have not yet got the true loblolly bay or alcea tho several say thay have sent it but I believe thay are species of sweet bay…[3]

By August of 1762, Bartram was positive he had Loblolly Bay growing in his garden and even locates its approximate position in a border of the upper garden.

some plants that grows naturally in or near water bears the dry weather as well as any I have I have one lobloly bay that came over in hot dry weather that grows the best of any of the Carolina evergreens sent this year notwithstanding I planted it in the highest border of my upper garden not knowing it was the Alcea so that now I am in hopes it will do well with me if the hard frosts dont kill & disrobe it as the other evergreens.[4]

The winter of 1762-1763 was particularly destructive to Bartram’s southern plants, as recorded in letters to Daniel Solander and Collinson in April and May:

my lobloly bay tho growed prodigiously in the summer is intirely killed last winter tho in A warm place it is in vain for us to expect to have the broad leaved evergreens of Carolina to flourish in the winter unless in A green house.[5]

Bartram’s friends in Charleston were quick to replace many of his southern evergreens, including the Loblolly Bay. In the spring and fall of 1763, he received several boxes with plants from Thomas Lamboll and Martha Logan.[6]

Bartram’s Loblolly Bay survived the winter of 1763-1764 and in May he could report to Collinson that his “lobloly bay …hath some green leaves.”[7] That summer it produced flower buds, but again the disappointed Bartram wrote in mid-August “my lobloly bay hath 4 fine buds for blosoms but this stormy day broke of the branch that produced them.”[8]

John Bartram could not help but observe the Loblolly Bay on his trip south to St. Augustine in 1765. Along their route south from North Carolina from July through September 1765, and again on leaving Savannah September 30th for Florida, John and William Bartram passed through many bay or cypress swamps where the major growth was often Loblolly Bay. John recorded “alcea” in the vicinity of Charleston in swamps on the Santee in his journal for July and August. October 1st, the day the Franklinia was found, the day’s riding was “very bad thro bay swamps.” Bartram also recorded Loblolly Bay on the banks of the Altamaha south of Fort Barrington following the encounter with the Franklinia.[9]

The Loblolly Bay remained an equally prized, but elusive plant in England at this time. Collinson also received the “Charming Plant” from Thomas Lamboll, but complained it did “not shoot away for want of Sun & Moisture.”[10] Bartram sent other plants, probably from some of the stock sent from Charleston. These did well, but were stolen from Collinson’s Mill Hill garden in December of 1765. Collinson reported “my no small Mortification, having been again robbed of my Most Curious plants What I most regret was thy kind present of Loblolly Bays which throve finely…”[11]

Because of the difficulty in growing and flowering the Loblolly Bay, it remained a puzzle to European botanists. Linnaeus gave it the name Hypericum Lasianthus in his first major work, the Hortus Cliffortianus of 1737. This placed it in the genus of St. John’s-worts. In the Gardener’s Dictionary, Phillip Miller recorded it was difficult or impossible to grow and placed it under the genus Hibiscus. Plants that could not be easily grown or forced to flower in Europe were routinely mis-classed and poorly described by European botanists. The same European scientists often discounted first-hand accounts of these same difficult subjects from skilled observers describing the plant in its native environment. The Loblolly Bay and its relation Franklinia would both suffer this fate.

The ultimate naming of the genus Gordonia was the result of a trans-Atlantic discussion that took over a decade. A series of letters regarding the Loblolly Bay passed between Alexander Garden, an Edinburgh trained physician recently immigrated to Charleston, South Carolina and John Ellis in London from 1756-1770. Garden recognized Linnaeus’ error in classifying the Loblolly Bay under Hypericum. In 1756, he suggested a new genus to be named “Gordonia”—“in honour of my old master, Dr. James Gordon, at Aberdeen.” Garden sent Ellis repeated shipments of plants and seed of the Loblolly Bay but apparently few if any were successful. The next spring, 1757, Garden retracted his name “Gordonia”, probably because he had been informed of the death of Dr. Gordon. Once suggested, however, the name Gordonia appears to have stuck. Ellis continued to use Gordonia in his correspondence with Garden in spite of Garden’s repeated statements to the counter: “you need not call the Loblolly Bay Gordonia,” and “this must not be called the Gordonia.” In 1760, Ellis suggested retaining the name Gordonia in honor of the London nurseryman, James Gordon (1708?- 1780). Once gardener to Lord Petre, John Bartram’s first patron, Gordon had succeeded in germinating seeds of the Loblolly Bay at his Mile-End nurseries. Over the next ten years, Alexander Garden wavered between his own desires to publish on the Loblolly Bay and frequent reminders to Ellis to officialize the name of Gordonia.[12]

            It was not until 1770 that John Ellis was finally able to sufficiently describe the plant from flowering specimens produced near London. Ellis named the plant in a letter to Linnaeus that was published by the Royal Society. Reporting, “that we have lately got into a method of cultivating that elegant evergreen-tree, called in South Carolina and the Floridas, the Loblollybay, or Alcea Floridana,” Ellis correctly placed the plant in the Linnaean class of Monadelphia Polyandria and announced the new genus Gordonia in honor of “that eminent gardener Mr. James Gordon.”[13] Garden received only slight credit in the published description by Ellis, but from December of 1770, the Loblolly Bay was officially known as Gordonia lasianthus.[14]

The Bartram family continued to experiment with the cultivation of Loblolly Bay in their Philadelphia garden, although without great success, except under glass. Through the first half of the 19th century they continued to list Gordonia lasianthus or Loblolly Bay in their catalogues. From the 1828 catalogue onward it was marked as a greenhouse plant. To this day the Loblolly Bay, although beautiful in its native environment, is rarely successful in cultivation to the north. A hardy plant similar in flower to the Loblolly Bay was a certain prize for both American and European gardens.

Read the full paper here:

“Franklinia alatamaha, A History of That “Very Curious” Shrub”

Read Part One and Two here:

Franklinkia Series: Finding Franklinia alatamaha (Part One)

Franklinia Series: Finding Franklinia alatamaha (Part Two)

Notes

[1] Mark Catesby, Natural history of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, vol. 1 (London, 1731-1743), 44, tab.44.

[2] John Bartram letters to William Bartram, 1761, The Correspondence of John Bartram, 1734-1777, eds. Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy Smith Berkeley (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1992), 518, 536, 543.

[3] John Bartram Letter to Peter Collinson, May 10, 1762, The Correspondence of John Bartram, 1734-1777, 559.

[4] John Bartram letter to Peter Collinson, August 15, 1762, The Correspondence of John Bartram, 1734-1777, 567.

[5] John Bartram letter to Daniel Solander and Peter Collinson, April and May 1763, The Correspondence of John Bartram, 1734-1777, 590.

[6] The Correspondence of John Bartram, 1734-1777, 590, 614, 617.

[7] John Bartram letter to Peter Collinson, May 10, 1764, The Correspondence of John Bartram, 1734-1777, 628.

[8] John Bartram letter to Peter Collinson, August 19, 1764, The Correspondence of John Bartram, 1734-1777, 636.

[9] John Bartram, “Diary of a Journey through the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida from July 1, 1765 to April 10, 1766,” ed. & annotated by Francis Harper, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, N.S. vol. 33, part 1 (1942), 14, 19, 31, 32, 49.

[10] Peter Collinson letter to John Bartram, September 15, 1760, The Correspondence of John Bartram, 1734-1777, 493.

[11] Peter Collinson letter to John Bartram, December 28, 1765, The Correspondence of John Bartram, 1734-1777, 657.

[12] Peter Collinson letter to John Bartram, winter 1737/1738, The Correspondence of John Bartram, 1734-1777, 75-79.

[13] John Ellis, “A Copy of a Letter from John Ellis, Esq, F.R.S. to Dr. Linnæus, F.R.S. &c. with the Figure and Characters of that elegant American Evergreen-tree, called by the Gardiners the Loblolly-Bay…,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, vol. 60 (December 1770), 519-520.

[14] Ellis previewed his intentions to name the Loblolly Bay Gordonia lasianthus in a letter to Linnaeus in September 1770. Apparently Linnaeus was not happy in the change in nomenclature and preferred “Lasianthus” as the new generic name. Ellis wrote December 28, 1770: “I am sorry I cannot oblige you in changing the name of Gordonia to Lasianthus as it has been presented to the Royal Society, and my worthy friend James Gordon has accepted this compliment.” James Edward Smith, A Selection of the Correspondence of Linnaeus and Other Naturalists, vol. 1 (London, 1821), 250-251, 254.

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The story of Franklinia continues roughly eight years later when William Bartram returned to Charleston, SC with a stipend of £50 per year to collect for Dr. John Fothergill. The events of William Bartram’s explorations can be largely reconstructed from two sources, his interim journals sent to Fothergill[1] and his volume of Travels… published in Philadelphia in 1791. William Bartram left Philadelphia March 20th and arrived in Charleston by April 1, 1773. His first expedition was a tour through the Georgia low country and Sea Islands. In the course of this collecting trip he crossed the Altamaha River at Fort Barrington, after traveling along the north bank from Darien. He recorded the crossing in the first volume of his manuscript journal, which was sent to Fothergill:

[April 24 or 25, 1773] Cross’t this famous River at Barrington about 30 miles above the Inlet & continued down the other side o’ the River keeping a Path through the Pine Forests generally in sight of the low lands of the River.[2]

Although Bartram probably passed the site of Franklinia on this journey, there is no mention of it in the surviving manuscript journal. In the final printed version of his Travels…, a re-encounter with the two curious shrubs, Franklinia and Pinckneya, does occur at this point in his trip.

I set off early in the morning for the Indian trading-house, in the river St. Mary, and took the road up the N.E. side of the Alatamaha to Fort-Barrington. I passed through a wellinhabited district, mostly rice plantations, on the water of Cathead creek, a branch of the Alatamaha. On drawing near the fort, I was greatly delighted at the appearance of two new beautiful shrubs, in all their blooming graces. One of them appeared to be a species of Gordonia,* [*Franklinia Alatamaha.] but the flowers are larger, and more fragrant than those of the Gordonia Lascanthus, and are sessile; the seed vessel is also very different. The other was equally distinguished for beauty and singularity…[3]

Francis Harper theorized William Bartram combined several discrete explorations into a single narrative here in the final text of Travels… The exploration of the St. Mary’s River, which follows the encounter with Franklinia at Fort Barrington in particular, probably did not occur until the late summer or fall of 1773 or the late spring-early summer of 1776.[4] This calls into question William Bartram’s account of Franklinia and Pinckneya in bloom together in late April. However, Bartram is even more specific on the initial sight of the flowers in the materials he sent Robert Barclay in 1788. Describing his illustration of Pinckneya he wrote:

…about 15 years ago when on discoveries in the employ of Doctor Fothergill I revisited the same place, in the Spring Season, when I had the pleasure and satisfaction of seeing it in perfection, in full flower, together with the Franklinia which then flourishe’d in sight of it.[5]

While “flourishe’d” may not be the same as flowering, the text accompanying William Bartram’s specimen of Franklinia sent to Barclay included dates for the flowering range:

very large white fragrant flowers… from April until the Autumn when it ceases flowering, whilst the seed of the flowers of the preceding Year are ripening.[6]

The original native time of flowering remains another of the mysteries surrounding Franklinia. William Bartram was exceptionally lax in regard to dates, and the published dates that appear in his Travels… are virtually all incorrect. Still Bartram does remain consistent in his record of flowers on Franklinia in April. [Latter third person accounts suggest Franklinia bloomed at least a month if not two months later in Pennsylvania than in its original location. Currently Franklinia begins blooming in mid to late July in Philadelphia.]

From the text of Travels… it is clear that the spring of 1773 was not William Bartram’s only visit to the unique location of Franklinia on the Altamaha. Bartram revisited the site in the summer of 1776, prior to his return home to Philadelphia. But it is also likely that he paid one or more additional visits to the site in 1773 or early 1774. A large block of his travels from July 1773 to March 1774 is recorded with only a brief overview:

I spent the remaining part of this season in botanical excursions to the low countries, between Carolina and East Florida, and collected seeds, roots, and specimens, making drawings of such curious subjects as could not be preserved in their native state of excellence.[7]

William Bartram could have collected seeds and specimens of Franklinia during this period for shipment to Fothergill. He would likely have timed a visit to collect ripe seed. He may have also prepared the earliest known drawing of Franklinia alatamaha in flower during this same period. It is even possible he gathered plants, which might have been cared for in Charleston by the Lamboll family or Dr. Lionel Chalmers, or in Darien, prior to shipment to London.

British gardening records suggest Franklinia was introduced to cultivation in 1774. William Aiton’s large catalogue of the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew records Gordonia pubescens was introduced in 1774 by Mr. William Malcolm.[8] William Malcolm (d. 1798) was active as a nurseryman in Kennington, in south London, beginning in the 1750s. He may have been acting as an agent for Fothergill. Accepting that this date is correct (which is far from certain—many of Aiton’s dates are now known to be inaccurate), and that the plant described as “Gordonia pubescens” was indeed Franklinia, William Bartram is the only likely source of the plant.

William Bartram sent Fothergill drawings of plants and animals on several occasions, as well as a large number of dried specimens from his explorations. Bartram probably sent seeds and plants as well to Fothergill, but these are poorly documented. The drawings and specimens passed into the hands of Joseph Banks after the death of Fothergill in 1780 and are housed today in the Natural History Museum in London. This collection of drawings was reprinted in large folio format by the American Philosophical Society in 1968 in an edition by Joseph Ewan. Most attention has been drawn to the large colored drawing of the Franklinia alatamaha dating to 1788, which forms the frontispiece of Ewan’s book. This drawing was part of a set of illustrations of four plants sent to Robert Barclay in London by William Bartram in November 1788 in something of a last effort to validate the names and descriptions for some of Bartram’s most important new plants from the South. This drawing and a pressed specimen of Franklinia (the specimen is now the type specimen for the species) were made from a garden grown plant of Franklinia growing at Bartram’s Garden.

A second illustration of Franklinia in the collections of the London Natural History Museum is actually more important as an historic document. It is the earliest known illustration of the plant. Ewan’s Plate 23 is a pen and ink drawing of Franklinia alatamaha that must have been completed in either 1774 or 1776, and sent to Fothergill as an illustration of the as yet unnamed shrub.[9] The original drawing was untitled and labeled “No. I”. It shows a flowering branch of Franklinia with a single perfect flower and an immature seed capsule. A detail comprising a single seed, a cross-section of the seed capsule, and the anther is given at the lower right. At a later date someone scrawled “Franklinia” on the bottom of the drawing, and traced or copied the sections of the mature seed capsule from William’s 1788 drawing for Barclay.

Drawings William Bartram sent to Fothergill can be divided into several different sets, probably sent at different times. Descriptive text or at least a key, now lost, probably once accompanied the figures. Each set of drawings had a slightly different numbering system, beginning with either “Tab.,” “Fig.,” or in the case of the Franklinia drawing “No.” Franklinia was “No. I” from a series of six drawings including the Soft-shelled Tortoise, an Ipomoea from the St. John’s River, a Canna, the Physic Nut, and Calycanthus florida. This set would seem to date after Bartram’s trip to Augusta, Georgia in June-July 1773 and after his several explorations of the St. John’s River in the summer of 1774. According to Harper, William Bartram may have prepared volume one of his journal, as well as some of his collections and illustrations in the vicinity of Spaulding’s Lower Store in Florida the fall of 1774. These materials were all sent to Fothergill from Sunbury, Georgia, via Liverpool, at the end of 1774.[10] This first Franklinia drawing might have been sent with this shipment, especially as it was grouped with several illustrations from the St. John’ s. Seeds or even plants of Franklinia could also have been sent by the same route. For Fothergill’s part he complained in a letter to John Bartram in July of 1774 that to date he had received about a hundred dried specimens of plants, and “a very few drawings, but neither a seed nor a plant.”[11]

Sometime during the late spring or summer of 1776 William Bartram revisited the Altamaha River. He returned to the remnant natural population of Franklinia, east of Fort Barrington, expressly to collect seed. As Harper has pointed out, it is again difficult to detail where William Bartram was in the spring and summer of 1776.[12] There is no documentation when his commission from Fothergill exactly ended. But with the outbreak of the war, presumably at some point he was informed or aware he could act on his own. Gathering “seed of two new and very curious shrubs” forms the entire substance of a short chapter in his Travels…—the only major event chronicled after his return from the west. Here William Bartram inserted the longest and most effusive account of the new shrub:

After my return from the Creek nation, I employed myself during the spring and fore part of summer, in revisiting the several districts in Georgia and the East borders of Florida, where I had noted the most curious subjects; collecting them together, and shipping them off to England. In the course of these excursions and researches, I had the opportunity of observing the new flowering shrub, resembling the Gordonia, in perfect bloom, as well as bearing ripe fruit. It is a flowering tree, of the first order for beauty and fragrance of blossoms: the tree grows fifteen or twenty feet high, branching alternately; the leaves are oblong, broadest towards their extremities and terminate with an acute point, which is generally a little reflexed; they are lightly serrated, attenuate downwards and sessile, or have very short petioles; they are places in alternate order, and towards the extremities of the twigs are crouded together, but stand more sparsedly below; the flowers are very large, expand themselves perfectly, are of a snowwhite colour, and ornamented with a crown or tassel of gold coloured refulgent stamina in their center; the inferior petal or segment of the corolla is hollow, formed like a cap or helmet, and entirely included the other four, until the moment of expansion; its exterior surface is covered with a short silky hair; the borders of the petals are crisped or plicated: these large white flowers stand single and sessile in the bosom of the leaves, which being near together towards the extremities of the twigs, and usually many expanded at the same time, make a gay appearance; the fruit is a large, round, dry, woody apple or pericarp, opening at each end oppositely by five alternate fissures, containing ten cells,[13] each replete with dry woody cuniform seed. This very curious tree was first taken notice of, about ten or twelve years ago, at this place, when I attended my father (John Bartram) on a botanical excursion; but, it being then late in the autumn, we could form no opinion to what class or tribe it belonged.

We never saw it grow in any other place, nor have I ever since seen it growing wild, in all my travels, from Pennsylvania to Point Coupe, on the banks of the Mississippi, which must be allowed a very singular and unaccountable circumstance; at this place there are two or three acres of ground where it grows plentifully.[14]

This detailed depiction was the result of long and close observation, and is still probably the best single description of Franklinia alatamaha.

The seed that William Bartram gathered on this last visit in 1776 became the source of every Franklinia that later grew at Bartram’s Garden. He again had the opportunity to ship seed to Fothergill in England with his final collections from Savannah (or Charleston), in early November 1776, but no documents remain to specify what might have been in those collections. William definitely brought seed back to his father’s garden when he returned to Philadelphia in January 1777. From here the plant entered cultivation and it is likely most (if not all) Franklinia alatamaha growing today can be traced back to the plants William Bartram sprouted in his father’s garden.

Read the full paper here:

“Franklinia alatamaha, A History of That “Very Curious” Shrub”

Read part one here:

Franklinia Series: Finding Franklinia alatamaha (Part One)

CHECK BACK IN TWO WEEKS FOR PART THREE!

Notes

[1] William Bartram, “Travels in Georgia and Florida, 1773-1774 A Report to Dr. John Fothergill,” ed. & annotated by Francis Harper Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, N.S. vol. 33, part 2 (1943), p.121-242.

[2] Ibid., 135, 174.

[3] William Bartram, Travels… (Philadelphia: James & Johnson, 1791), 16.

[4] The Travels of William Bartram: Naturalist’s Edition, ed. with commentary and an annotated index by Francis Harper (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), 337-338, 345-346.

[5] William Bartram letter to Robert Barclay, November 1788, William Bartram, The Search for Nature’s Design: Selected Art, Letters, and Unpublished Writings. Edited by Thomas Hallock and Nancy E. Hoffmann, (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 148.

[6] William Bartram to Robert Barclay, November 1788, William Bartram Botanical and Zoological Drawings,1756-1788…, ed. with commentary by Joseph Ewan (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1968), 164.

[7] William Bartram, Travels… (Philadelphia: James & Johnson, 1791), 48.

[8] William Aiton, Hortus Kewensis, or, A catalogue of the plants cultivated in the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew, vol. 2, printed for George Nicol (London, 1789), 231.

[9] William Bartram letter to Robert Barclay, November 1788, William Bartram Botanical and Zoological Drawings, ed. Joseph Ewan, 62-63, Plate 23.

[10] William Bartram, Travels… (Philadelphia: James & Johnson, 1791), 304-306; William Bartram, “A Report to Dr. John Fothergill,” ed. Harper, 124.

[11] John Fothergill letter to William Bartram, July 8, 1772, The Correspondence of John Bartram 1734-1777, ed. by Edmund and Dorothy Smith Berkeley, (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1992), 764

[12] The Travels of William Bartram: Naturalist’s Edition, ed. Harper, 416-417.

[13] There are actually only five cells in the seed capsule of the Franlinia alatamaha.

[14] William Bartram, Travels… (Philadelphia: James & Johnson, 1791), 467-468.

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