Historical Context for the Botanic Manuscript of Jane Colden (1724-1760), America's First Woman Botanist
Fenella Greig Heckscher
The Botanic Manuscript of Jane Colden (1724-1760) written in the mid-eighteenth century describes over 300 plants found around her father's farm in colonial New York province. She has the distinction of being America's first woman botanist, but her work, the earliest record of New York flora in English, remains largely unknown. In Europe the quest for knowledge in the Age of Enlightenment included the desire of early botanists to learn about plants of the New World. In colonial America few early visitors or settlers had time or ability to satisfy this desire, to explore and send descriptions, seeds or plant materials to Europe. These early writings and illustrations are preserved for study today at Oak Spring Garden Library. This collection offered me the chance to examine such early sources to help place Jane Colden's botanical work in its time and place. While her Botanic Manuscript sleeps in the Natural History Museum, London, a book to celebrate the tercentenary of her birth is planned. The partial account of her manuscript (edited by Rickett and Hall; published 1963) deserves a renewed effort to provide her with a place in botanical history.
Jane's botanical interest and knowledge came from her father, Dr Cadwallader Colden (1688-1776), and is told through his extensive correspondence (The Colden papers: New York Historical Society). His studies at the University of Edinburgh for ‘Physick’ included botany as the basis of medical therapy of that time. Dr Colden arrived in Philadelphia in 1710 with a medical qualification and an enquiring mind. In America his abilities were extended to the needs of the developing colonies with appointment in 1720 as Surveyor General for the province of New York. In this capacity his wide travels allowed him to become acquainted with New World plants and their uses by local Indigenous American tribes. In 1728 he moved his family, including four-year old Jane, to his frontier farm. This wild land, now the borders of Ulster and Orange Counties, was to become the base for her plant collecting. Dr Colden, a prolific letter writer, became a correspondent of Peter Collinson, the London pen-friend of early plant collectors seeking American plants. Through him Colden was introduced to a network of European botanists. From his remote farm he reached out to European centers of botanical learning, including with botanists Johann Frederick Gronovius in the Netherlands and with Carl Linnaeus in Sweden. An American Quaker farmer turned plant collector, John Bartram, visited the Colden farm while on a Catskill trek to hunt for tree seeds for Peter Collinson. Jane Colden as a young onlooker became drawn into the fascination for American plants by the great botanical men of the time.
Figure 1: John Josselyn, An Account of Two Voyages to New-England, 1674: detail of Collinson annotation to 'bastard daffodil.'
In 1742 Dr Colden wrote to Peter Collinson to lament how America was poor in knowledge and lacked resources, wishing for a botanical book in English as Latin was little known. When consumed by affairs of the province as head of the King's Counsel and later Lieutenant Governor, Colden encouraged Jane's botanical interest. Educated at home along with her seven living siblings Jane's curiosity for the natural world led her far beyond the domestic lives of her three sisters. In 1755 Colden wrote to Gronovius, ‘I have a daughter who has an inclination to reading & a curiosity for natural History … & a sufficient capacity for … competent knowledge. I took the pains to explain Linnaeus’s system & to put it in English for her use by freing it of the technical terms … . She is now grown very fond of the study … She has already a pretty large volume in writing of the Description of plants.’ The manuscript contains headings for 341 plants, full descriptions for many including a Linnaean approach to plants, some added observations in more lively words, and outline drawings of leaves. It was a work in progress in 1760 when she suffered an early death following childbirth. The manuscript survived into another life: taken by a Hessian soldier on his return to Germany after the Revolution, it later found a respected home in the London Natural History Museum.
Figure 2: John Gerard, The Herball or Generall History of Plants, revised by Thomas Johnson, 1633, 'Swallow wort', woodcut.
Jane's creation of the Botanic Manuscript can be viewed in context with other early American botanical writings and illustrations by plant explorers in the early colonial settlements. The North-East colonies, the closest to Colden's New York flora, offers just one contribution: John Josselyn in 1674 provided Account of two voyages to New England. The OSGL copy is of special note as that owned by Peter Collinson, it has his handwritten notes in the margins. Josselyn notes a few plants with brief descriptions. His ‘bastard yellow daffodil with spotted leaves’ has Collinson's addition of ‘dens canis’ that sheds light on Colden’s No. 236 ‘Erythronium. Dogs Tooth’ (now named Erythronium Americanum, yellow trout lily) (fig. 1).
The colonies centered around Virginia produced more early descriptions. A New World plant aroused curiosity in its form shown in an early woodcut of ‘Silkgrass’ (milkweed) shown in John Gerard's The herball or generall historie of plants enlarged and amended by Thomas Johnson, 1633 (fig. 2). Far more extensive writing and colored illustrations were created by Mark Catesby (1683-1749) in his Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands. He etched the watercolors he had painted in America and published them in eleven parts between 1729 and 1747. The two enormous folios show his illustrations of flora depicted together with various fauna, with accompanying description in English and French (fig. 3). He included some 183 plants, exploring far south of Virginia and into the Caribbean islands. These coastal areas differed from the rocky hills and post-glacial soil of Colden's mid-Hudson Valley, but the plants showed overlap with seventeen plants also described by Jane Colden. These expensive volumes which excited Europe were not available in America to spread knowledge of their own botanical riches. Catesby’s volumes have now become treasured in a number of American libraries.
Figure 3: Mark Catesby, The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, 1, 48, ‘The Baltimore Oriole and the Tulip-Tree’, etching.
A small book containing written descriptions of many hundreds of plants was probably more available. John Clayton (1694-1773) explored and collected in Virginia. He sent many descriptions, seeds and plant materials first to Catesby in London who facilitated getting these to Gronovius. He was joined in his study of these by Linnaeus, looking over his shoulder during a chance visit to Leyden, aiding in plant identification and classification. In the two-part publication of Flora Virginica (1739; 1743) the titlepage lists Clayton as observer and collector, and Gronovius as describer for each genus and species (fig. 4). This first description of a large number of American plants used the new Linnaean form of description and classification. Collinson encouraged Colden to connect with John Clayton, but there is no record of them meeting or corresponding. However, a copy of Flora Virginica sent by Gronovius from Leyden finally reached Dr Colden after being feared lost during a two-year journey. This was probably the only book describing American plants that was available to Jane, but with a text in Latin and no illustrations. (A second edition in the OSG Library contains a rare map illustrating the path of John Clayton's plant exploration.)
Figure 4: John Clayton and J. F. Gronovius, Flora Virginica, Title page, Part I, 1739.
There is no record of Dr Colden's library to show his botanical resources. In 1755 he requested more botanical books from Peter Collinson in England, specifically asking for illustrated publications for Jane's use to find similarities with her new plants. These early European 'herbaria', likely known from Dr Colden's student days, were weighty volumes containing a wide collection of plants known at that time, but a rare few from America. Robert Morison's Historia Plantarum Universalis Oxoniensis (1680; 1699) on each huge page offered 9-12 illustrations in detailed copperplate engravings of the full plant (fig. 5). Joseph Pitton de Tournefort's Institutiones rei Herbariae (1700) was a more moderate size; text and illustrations mostly show only the anatomy of single flowers as used in his system of identification. It is unclear if these bulky books ever arrived, with Collinson reporting lack of space in a private trunk for shipping. Colden's intent was clear that these illustrated books would add encouragement to the words in Flora Virginica for his daughter's work to create an English description of New York Flora.
These early books do much to demonstrate the limited botanical sources of that time. All were written by men who were well educated in Europe, enabled by printers and illustrators to be published in centers of learning. This is the context that allows Jane Colden's creation of her Botanic Manuscript to be seen as extraordinary in her time and place: her compilation of the earliest description of New York Flora in English with its leaf outline illustrations, deserves credit in itself, alongside her place as America’s first woman botanist.