John Bartram

John Bartram (March 23, 1699 – September 22, 1777) was an American-born farmer, botanist, horticulturalist, and explorer, who made significant contributions to the collection, dissemination, and study of North American flora and fauna.

History

The son of a Quaker farmer in rural Pennsylvania, John Bartram lacked access to education and books, but possessed from an early age a “great inclination to botany & natural history,” which he pursued through exploration and independent study. In his late twenties, Bartram relocated from the Pennsylvania countryside to the outskirts of Philadelphia — the epicenter of the American scientific community — where he established himself as a farmer on 142 acres of property along the lower Schuylkill River. A half dozen acres he reserved for a garden, which he filled with plants discovered while exploring the surrounding countryside. He also collected leaves, ferns, and grasses for his friends Benjamin Franklin and the naturalist Joseph Breintnall (d. 1746), who were then experimenting with nature prints made by inking natural specimens and transferring the impressions to paper. Bartram's contributions enabled Breintnall to make a very complete, two-volume collection of leaves indigenous to Philadelphia — a collection that greatly interested botanical enthusiasts in Europe, such as the Quaker cloth merchant Peter Collinson, an enterprising Fellow of the Royal Society in London. Breintnall sent Collinson 130 of the prints in October 1733, , and also informed him that Bartram would be “a very proper person” to furnish him with actual seeds and plants from North America. “Being a native of Pensilvania with a numerous Family,” Breitnall observed, “The profits ariseing from Gathering Seeds would enable him to support it.” With that, Bartram and Collinson embarked on a 35-year friendship and business partnership conducted exclusively through correspondence.

Bartram began sending North American seeds to Collinson in 1736. Soon he was filling orders for nuts, tubers, live plants, and dried specimens, sending a duplicate of each so that Collinson could “gett them named by our most knowing Botanists and return them again — which will improve thee more than Books.” In May 1737 Collinson returned 208 specimens to Bartram, with identifications made by Johann Jacob Dillenius (1684-1747), curator of the Oxford University Botanic Garden. Through Collinson's agency, Bartram exchanged seeds and specimens connected Bartram with several eminent members of the European scientific community, including Philip Miller, director of the Chelsea Physic Garden in London, Carolus Linnaeus, professor of medicine and botany at Uppsala, and Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753), president of the Royal Society. He also filled requests for members of the British nobility and gentry who were creating American gardens at their country seats. Bartram’s British correspondents frequently compensated him with books, rather than money, enabling him to assemble a much valued natural history reference library. In exchange for his services to Dillenius, Collinson sent him the first volume of Phillip Miller's Gardener's Dictionary, and he received the supplement two years later from his most reliable aristocratic client, Lord Petre (1713-1742) of Thorndon Hall. Bartram also received seeds from his appreciative British contacts, allowing him to cultivate an encyclopedic botanic variety in his own garden. In 1736 Collinson sent him a collection of “60 sorts of Curious seeds” that he and Phillip Miller had assembled for him, and from Lady Petre he received the seed of a rare pear tree that flourished in his garden for over 150 years. By 1740 Bartram had established “a Settled Trade & Business” in the provision of seeds and plants to England, with Collinson acting as his middleman. Bartram assembled seed boxes containing 100 specimens, chiefly of trees and shrubs, distributing them to several dozen subscribers recruited by Collinson. Bartram was simultaneously supplying a growing European market for live plants from North American, as well as increasing demand for exotic specimens among American gardeners in Philadelphia, Charleston, and New York.

In addition to gathering plants, cuttings, and roots from his own garden, Bartram made expeditions up and down the East Coast in search of rare and useful plants. He sent reports on plant life and natural phenomena he observed in his travels to Collinson and Franklin in London and they, in turn, shared these reports with the Royal Society, which occasionally published them in the Transactions. With the exception of a four-year hiatus from 1746 to 1749, Bartram traveled virtually every year from 1735 until 1766, hunting for natural specimens and touring gardens. Armed with an itinerary and letters of introduction from Collinson, Bartram traveled through Maryland and Virginia in the autumn of 1738, where he was disappointed to find the gardens "poorly furnished with Curiosities." Even the noted gardens of William Byrd and John Clayton) lacked the variety of plants found in Philadelphia, enriches by importations from England, France, Holland, and Germany. Through Collinson, Bartram met Cadwallader Colden and his daughter Jane, with whom he corresponded and whom he visited several times at Coldengham, the family seat in New York. There, in the spring of 1755, Bartram made the acquaintance of Dr. Alexander Garden of Charleston, who sought him out in Philadelphia a few months later and spent several days exploring the surrounding countryside in his company. Bartram returned the favor in 1760, making his first trip to North and South Carolina. While visiting Garden in Charleston, he met several owners of important gardens, among them Elizabeth and Thomas Lamboll (reliable correspondents who sent Bartram a barrel of pomegrantes, china oranges, and sour oranges in 1765 when they were unable to procure an umbrella tree) conduits for seeds from Florida, and Martha Daniell Logan, a keen gardener and horticulturalist, and author of the Gardeners Kalender. The latter encounter resulted in a lengthy exchange of letters, as well as seeds, roots, and bulbs — several of which Logan obtained from the gardens of her Charleston neighbors. “I was with her about five minutes, in much company,” Bartram acknowledged in a letter to Peter Collinson in 1762, “Yet we contracted such a mutual correspondence, that one silk bag of seed hath passed and repassed full of seeds three times since last fall.”

As a further boost to this business, Collinson published Bartram’s seed catalogue in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1751, touting it as “the largest Collection that has ever before been imported into this Kingdom.”<Armstrong, 2004, 25.> Still it was not enough. In 1761, Bartram complained to Collinson of the seemingly insatiable desire for novel curiosities. “Do they think I can make new ones? I have sent them seeds of almost every tree and shrub from Nova Scotia to Carolina; very few are wanting: and from the sea across the continent to the lakes… and if I die a martyr to Botany, God’s will be done.” Rising demand required expanded production. “I must inlarge my nursery garden,” Bartram informed a friend in August 1769.

Texts

• July 18, 1739, Bartram, John, describing Westover, seat of William Byrd II, on the James River, Va. (1992: 121)

“Col Byrd is very prodigal in Gates roads walks hedges & seeders [cedars] trimed finely & A little green house with 2 or 3 [orange] trees . . .”

• September 25, 1748, Kalm, Peter [Pehr], Travels into North America (1770, 1: 112-13)

"Mr. John Bartram is an Englishman, who lives in the country about four miles from Philadelphia. He has acquired a great knowledge of natural philosophy and history, and seems to be born with a peculiar genius for these sciences.... He has in several successive years made frequent excursions into different distant parts of North America, with an intention of gathering all sorts of plants which are scarce and little known. Those which he found he has planted in his own botanical garden, and likewise sent over their seeds or fresh roots to England. We owe to him the knowledge of many scarce plants, which he first found, and which were never known before."

• November 4, 1754, Garden, Alexander to Cadwallader Colden (quoted in Colden, 1920: 471-72).

"I have met wt very Little new in the Botanic way unless Your acquaintance Bartram, who is what he is & whose acquaintance alone makes amends for other disappointments in that way.... One Day he Dragged me out of town & Entertain'd me so agreably with some Elevated Botanicall thoughts, on oaks, Firns, Rocks & c that I forgot I was hungry till we Landed in his house about four Miles from Town....

"His garden is a perfect portraiture of himself, here you meet wt a row of rare plants almost covered over wt weeds, here with a Beautiful Shrub, even Luxuriant Amongst Briars, and in another corner an Elegant & Lofty tree lost in common thicket — on our way from town to his house he carried me to severall rocks & Dens where he shewed me some of his rare plants, which he had brought from the Mountains &c. In a word he disdains to have a garden less than Pensylvania [sic] & Every den is an Arbour, Every run of water, a Canal, & every small level Spot a Parterre, where he nurses up some of his Idol Flowers & cultivates his darling productions. He had many plants whose names he did not know, most or all of which I had seen & knew them — On the other hand he had several I had not seen & some I never heard of."

• June 24, 1760, Bartram, John, in a letter to Peter Collinson, describing his plans for the Bartram Botanic Garden and Nursery, vicinity of Philadelphia, Pa. (quoted in Darlington 1849: 224)

“Dear friend, I am going to build a greenhouse. Stone is got; and hope as soon as harvest is over to begin to build it, to put some pretty flowering winter shrubs, and plants for winter’s diversion; not to be crowded with orange trees, or those natural to the Torrid Zone, but such as will do, being protected from frost.”

• December 3, 1762, Bartram, John, describing Charleston, S.C. (quoted in Darlington 1849: 242–43)

“I can’t find, in our country, that south walls are much protection against our cold, for if we cover so close as to keep out the frost, they are suffocated.”

• Darlington, William, 1849, describing Bartram Botanic Garden and Nursery, vicinity of Philadelphia, Pa. (pp. 18–19)

“He [John Bartram] was, perhaps, the first Anglo-American who conceived the idea of establishing a BOTANIC GARDEN for the reception and cultivation of the various vegetables, natives of the country, as well as exotics, and of travelling for the discovery and acquisition of them.

“* The BARTRAM BOTANIC GARDEN, (established in or about the year 1730,) is most eligibly and beautifully situated, on the right bank of the river Schuylkill, a short distance below the city of Philadelphia. Being the oldest establishment of the kind in this western world, and exceedingly interesting, from its history and associations, — one might almost hope, even in this utilitarian age, that, if no motive more commendable could avail, a feeling of state or city pride, would be sufficient to ensure its preservation, in its original character, and for the sake of its original objects. But, alas! there seems to be too much reason to apprehend that it will scarcely survive the immediate family of its noble-hearted founder, — and that even the present generation may live to see the accumulated treasures of a century laid waste—with all the once gay parterres and lovely borders converted into lumberyards and coal-landings.”

Images

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  John or William Bartram, "A Draught of John Bartram's House and Garden as it appears from the River," 1758.