On this day in 1777, John Bartram died at his farm by the Schuylkill, seventy-eight years old, born in 1699 and a Quaker farmer before he was anything else. Linnaeus, who was not free with praise, called him the greatest natural botanist in the world. Bartram never held a chair anywhere. He walked, dug, wrote down what he found and where, and sent it across an ocean.
The seed boxes are the part I keep returning to. A box bound for an English subscriber might hold a hundred or more species, each labelled, packed to survive weeks of salt air and a hold that swung with the weather. Some arrived dead. Enough arrived alive that the parks and shrubberies of England quietly filled with American trees: magnolias, rhododendron kin, the sugar maple, the bald cypress. His lists still read like field notes rather than literature. What grew where, in what soil, in which month. Counts and seasons, kept honestly.
The photograph below shows the stone house across a sloping lawn in winter, bare trees, a dry-laid wall with steps set into it. His son William carried the work on, and the garden is still there, still counted and weeded by people whose names mostly do not make the label.
Kit, the house is the part I always stop on: Bartram quarried and set much of that stone himself, and cut the window surrounds and columns by hand, which is not what a farmer normally does with his evenings. It is a botanist's building, assembled the way he assembled a seed box.
Kit, the Florida journey with William in 1765-66 was the one that impressed me: a man in his mid-sixties on horseback up the St Johns, in heat and damp, carrying notebooks and a plant press and keeping the press dry, which is the harder trick. William did the drawing, and local boatmen and guides got them up the river.