Botany, the study of plants, was the most actively pursued observational science in the late colonial and early national periods. The practice occupied the minds, filled the gardens, and guided the travels of hundreds of university-educated and selftaught men and women. This period witnessed the founding of botanical gardens; the publication of books, articles, and manuals for learned and popular audiences; the establishment of botany as a mainstay in college curricula; and the application of botanical knowledge toward an efficient and more bountiful agriculture. The period also saw American botanists enhance their position in the international botanical community from backwater collectors for foreign patrons to full-fledged, contributing members of the discipline, respected the world over.
Botany was practiced by a few men living in North America during the colonial period, primarily as collectors and agents of European naturalists and scientific societies looking to acquire samples for rare plant gardens and natural history cabinets. Pennsylvania's John Bartram (1699-1777), New York's Cadwallader Colden (1688-1776), and South Carolina's Alexander Garden (c. 1730-1791) laid the foundation of professional American botany through correspondence and sample and seed trade with European naturalists, particularly Peter Collinson and the Royal Society in London. At the same time Bartram, Colden, Garden, and others also drew on neighbors' and farmers' knowledge of local plants, suggesting that careful attention to plants was not an exclusively elite pursuit. Beginning in the late twentieth century, scholars have noted that much botanical information also came from women and slaves, which prompts an opportunity to revisit dominant narratives about the history of science and exposes rich new veins for future scholarship.
The years following the American Revolution (1775-1783) witnessed an efflorescence in botanical activity with the publication of new books, the creation of professorships at universities, the founding of professional scientific and medical journals covering the subject, and the establishment of the nation's first botanical gardens. Animated by nationalist zeal, botany enthusiasts sponsored exploratory expeditions into the interior of the continent—the expedition of Lewis and Clark, most famously—and encouraged ordinary citizens to describe plants in their neighborhoods and report their findings to the emerging scientific centers in Philadelphia, Boston, New York, and Charleston. Proponents of botany urged American citizens to scour forests and fields for plants that could be used for food, dyes, manufactures, and medicines; they suggested that, along with a financial windfall to the individual, the American who discovered a plant that could aid the growth of the nation was a true patriot. Benjamin Smith Barton (1766-1815), professor of botany at the University of Pennsylvania, urged readers of his Collections for an Essay towards a Materia Medica of the United States (1798) to consider that "the man who discovers one valuable new medicine is a more important benefactor to his species than Alexander, Caesar, or an hundred other conquerors." Barton's other textbook, his Elements of Botany (1803), became a discipline standard.
American-born botanists, however, were disappointed to observe that the most successful botanists studying North America were foreign-born and that their publications dominated the first years of the nineteenth century. In 1803 the French father-son team of André and François-André Michaux published North American Flora, the first general account of North American botany. In 1814 Frederick Pursh, the German traveler-botanist, published his two-volume Flora Americae Septentrionalis, the most comprehensive American botany text to date. American-born botanists redoubled their efforts and quickly rose to the forefront of botany in their native land.
Amos Eaton (1776-1842), John Torrey (17961873), and Asa Gray (1810-1888) each published important botanical texts in the decades that followed—the latter two becoming the nation's preeminent botanists of the nineteenth century. These texts comprised naming, classifying, and describing the flora of the United States, and their authors spared little ink as they debated the merits of rival classificatory systems, the correct scientific and common names for plants, and the assignment of credit for the discovery of individual species.
Interest in plants was not confined to the academic elite. Unfortunately, historians know little about what might be termed "garden botany," local knowledge and experience of plants that went unrecorded by ordinary Americans. Only tantalizing glimpses of such knowledge can be found in the correspondence of credentialed botanists and in the conversations between those botanists and the ordinary Americans described in their botanical texts.