The natures of John and William Bartram

by Thomas P. Slaughter

John Bartram was the greatest collecting botanist of his day, and personally introduced fully one quarter of all the plants that reached Europe from the New World during the colonial period. He established one of the first botanical gardens in America and turned it into a commercial nursery, linking Europe and America with a mail-order business in seeds and plants. He was a founding member of the American Philosophical Society, a Quaker disowned by his Meeting for heresy, and a central character in Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer. His son William was America's first great native-born natural historian and important painter of nature, developing his own surrealist style. He was the author of Travels, America's first significant book of natural history - a work that inspired the poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge, provided wilderness settings for the novels of Charles Brockden Brown and James Fenimore Cooper, and influenced the nature-based philosophy of Emerson and Thoreau.