18th Century Botanical Illustrations
The American landscape was shaped and chartered those who took active roles in capturing its beauty and power. Before an industrialized lifestyle the colonies on the east coast of North America boasted flora that the Old World had never known.
There was a bounty of amazing plants along the coast and specifically in the fertile and varied land in the colony called South Carolina. Doctors Alexander Garden of Scotland and Andre’ Micheaux of France (later of New France/Canada) were America’s first influential botanists who discovered and catalogued hundreds of plants native to America, many of which had healing properties.
Garden and Micheaux also share the commonality of setting up their greenhouses and gardens in Charleston, South Carolina during the late 1700s. Both also left Charleston due to pre-war tensions rising along the east coast. Micheaux later left Charleston for the newly established Kentucky to avoid the Revolutionary War and Garden, after lengthy deliberation, left Charleston for London and sided with the Loyalists of the Revolution. Micheaux and Garden have been widely published and praised for their cataloguing discoveries, but behind the professional facets of their lives were men who at the core were carving their own spaces out in pre-colonial America.
At a time when ambitions ran high with the prospects of a better life in a new land Micheaux and Garden explored an undeveloped nation and healed some of its most prominent members along the way.
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