The Woman Who Named the Wildflowers

The window stands open to the meadow, and the room smells of drying ink and pressed leaves. On the table a single sheet holds the drawing of a plant in fine detail, root and stem and leaf and flower, set down by a hand trained to miss nothing. A young woman on a Hudson Valley farm dips her pen and writes beside it a name in the new language of science.

It is 1753.

She does not just keep a garden. She walks the meadows, woods, and marshes around her father’s estate and writes down what grows there, describing and illustrating more than three hundred plants, by some counts more than four hundred, each one sorted by the system that Linnaeus has lately set loose upon the world.

She does not just copy the books out of Europe. She makes the fullest botanical record of her corner of New York set down by anyone before the nineteenth century, pressing leaf impressions into the pages and drawing every specimen by her own hand.

She does not just study in private. In 1756 a plant description she has prepared appears in a European learned journal, widely regarded as among the first Linnaean descriptions a woman has published anywhere.

She does not just earn a passing compliment. She is read across the Atlantic by naturalists such as Peter Collinson and Alexander Garden, and Collinson writes to Linnaeus himself that she is perhaps the first lady to have so perfectly studied his system, and that she deserves to be celebrated.

Her Spark of Liberty was the right to name the living world and keep her own name on the work.

She did the work of a scientist in an age that called it a woman’s amusement. Her descriptions reached the world inside the letters of men who chose whether to carry her name or to leave it off, and it was often left off, folded into Linnaeus’s system or reprinted as though no one in particular had written it.

Now, “Where History Comes to Life.”

Born in New York City on March 27, 1724, she was raised on her family’s estate in the lower Hudson Valley and taught botany by her father, a Scottish-born physician who later became lieutenant governor of the province. Between roughly 1753 and 1758 she compiled an illustrated manuscript flora of the region, describing several hundred species. A plant she named in honor of her correspondent Alexander Garden was later reassigned by Linnaeus, and her chosen name did not stand. She married Dr. William Farquhar in 1759, after which her botanical work appears to have stopped. She died on March 10, 1766, about forty-one years old. Her manuscript was never published in her lifetime, and its pages scattered afterward among institutions in London, where later botanists studied them. She is often called America’s first female botanist, an honorific fixed to her long after her death.

Her name was Jane Colden.

Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon

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