Header Image: Drawings from Jane Colden’s manuscript, including gardenia (top left). Botanic Manuscript, Botany Library, Natural History Museum (https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/jane-colden-first-american-female-botanist)
Jane Colden at first hesitated. Her father, Cadwallader Colden, had pushed her out into the New York woods to carry on botanical research in his stead. Cadwallader was now in his sixties, too tired to consistently forage for new specimens, and his eyesight too diminished to capture the minute details of plants’ anatomy. Jane only sporadically filled out her initial botanical entries, more used to household duties and the making and marketing of cheese from the Colden dairy herd. Cadwallader, it seems, frustratingly had to convince Jane that botany was worth her time. Her sister Kate, according to Cadwallader, displayed “Wild Giddy humours.” By contrast, Jane was calm, careful, and meticulous. So he saw her as his scientific heir, and extended his own work through the loving commitment of his daughter.
Botany slowly grew on Jane. In 1753, she catalogued one hundred forty, mostly wild, plants. She explored the rolling upland of her surroundings, including the ponds, swamps, rocky hills, and winding streams. Using her father’s copy of Genera Plantarum (1737), she learned Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus’s new taxonomic system, and by 1756, she had classified and described over three hundred local plants in the hills of the Hudson Valley.
Jane’s parents Cadwallader and Alice Christy Colden were both well-educated children of Scottish clergy. Cadwallader received a degree from the University of Edinburgh and then sought opportunity, like many educated Scots, in the wider British Empire, moving to Philadelphia in 1710. In the Quaker metropolis, Cadwallader practiced medicine and befriended a growing intellectual elite, including book collector, polymath, and Pennsylvania statesman James Logan. Cadwallader saw more latent potential in New York, so he moved his family to that city in 1718, where he became the surveyor general in 1720, but moved once again several years later to a 3,000-acre tract in Orange County, New York. Jane was born on March 27, 1724 and grew up in the secluded environment of Cadwallader’s country house. Her father had been involved in New York politics, gaining a seat on the colony’s council, but grew disillusioned and irritated with the political turmoil of the 1730s and the 1741 fires, conspiracy trials, and executions in Manhattan. He preferred the life of a withdrawn natural philosopher. He relished in his scientific correspondence with John Bartram in Philadelphia and Peter Collinson in London, wrote his own natural philosophy called An Explication of the First Causes of Action in Matter; and, of the Cause of Gravitation (1745), and encouraged Benjamin Franklin to found a philosophical society. Cadwallader became a member of the first iteration of the American Philosophical Society in 1744.
In the 1750s, Cadwallader excitedly told his scientific correspondents of his daughter’s consummate skill. And word spread. “Our friend Colden’s daughter has,” Collinson wrote to Bartram in 1756, “in a scientific manner, sent over several sheets of plants, very curiously anatomized after his [Linnaeus’s] method. I believe she is the first lady that has attempted anything of this nature.” Collinson wrote to Linnaeus that same year that “what is marvellous, his daughter is perhaps the first lady that has so perfectly studied your system. She deserves to be celebrated.” Through her father, Jane met and corresponded with leading naturalists from around the world. John Bartram wrote excitedly to Jane discussing her botanical work, and noted that “I should be extremely glad to see thee once at my house, and to show thee my garden.”
Jane’s botanical journal included both morphological and taxonomic descriptions of specimens and, occasionally, particular uses—medicinal or domestic—of plants she learned from talking to other settlers in the countryside or Native Americans. She wrote her observations with confidence, even challenging the authority of Linnaeus himself: “Linnaeus describes [polygala] as being a Papilionatious Flower, and calls the two largest Leaves of the Cup Alae…I must beg Leave to differ from him…the Seed Vessell, differs from all that I have observed of the Papilionatious Kind.” Indeed, as other scholars have noted, some of Jane’s botanical work likely contributed to Linnaeus’s Species Plantarum (1753). In 1753, she stumbled upon a small pink-flowered plant that resembled plants of the genus Hypericum. But its anatomical characteristics, to Jane, looked distinct. She believed she had not only discovered a new species, but also one that warranted its own genus. In 1756, the Edinburgh Essays and Observations, Physical and Literary published her claim for the creation of a new genus for what she called “Gardenia,” named after her colleague Alexander Garden. Yet other botanists disagreed, including Linnaeus, and they assigned the plant to Hypericum (Jane would be proved correct in the 19th century, but her role in the discovery was long forgotten). The quality of her work far surpassed her father’s initial expectations. Jane had become a prominent voice among trans-Atlantic science, a trusted source on the flora of the “New World.”
In March of 1759, just before she turned 35, Jane married William Farquhar, a widower 20 years her senior. She found a loving marriage. They were romantic and caring. “O Cate,” Jane wrote to her sister, “if you had a Husband you would feel for every little Sickness or pain he had, in a manner you knew nothing of before.” William had accidentally pulled his thigh spinning her around, she joyously explained to her sister. In a year’s time, Jane had a baby. But new life brought the end of hers. On March 1760, Jane passed away, likely from complications of childbirth. Her voice would gradually fall into obscurity. The baby did not survive past infancy.
But Jane’s work continued to travel. For circumstances still unknown, her botanic manuscript, later titled “Flora of New York,” ended up in the hands of a Hessian soldier, Captain F. von Wangenheim. Cadwallader was a Loyalist. He retired from public life as the American Revolution began, and died on September 28, 1776. Items were likely lost, plundered, and sold. Wangenheim spent eight years of service in America, where he studied the timber of the country (he later became a Prussian forest officer). He never wrote down how he acquired Jane’s manuscript, but he added his own preface to the work in 1782, praising Jane’s botanical descriptions. Wangenheim then gave the manuscript to Ernst Gottfried Baldinger, a professor of botany and medicine at Göttingen, and then Marburg. When Baldinger died of apoplexy in 1804, the manuscript fell into the hands of Joseph Banks (APS 1787), then president of the Royal Society. Its final home became the British Museum, where it is today.
For a very brief moment, Jane had forged her way into the networks of global science. She waded through streams, climbed rocky hills, and sifted through mossy marshes to explore the undocumented nature of New York. The American Revolution both disrupted her memory and preserved it. Although she is now remembered as “America’s first woman botanist,” her work left the United States just as the new country endeavored to set its new conditions of existence, quite fitting given her family’s Loyalist politics. Her botanic manuscript now rests in the archives of the British Museum, London’s most visible vestige of British Empire.
If you're interested in learning more about Jane Colden or seeing more images from her Botanic Manuscript, there is a book chronicling Jane's life and work, by Fenella Greig Heckscher, forthcoming from the APS Press. You can pre-order your copy here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/jane-colden-s-botanic-manuscript-the-legacy-of-america-s-first-woman-botanist-fenella-greig-heckscher/bec39ed14c54cc10?ean=9781606180488&next=t&next=t.
References:
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Dixon, John M. The Enlightenment of Cadwallader Colden: Empire, Science, and Intellectual Culture in British New York. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016.
Dixon, John. “Between Script and Specie: Cadwallader Colden’s Printing Method and the Production of Permanent, Correct Knowledge.” Early American Studies 8 (2010): 75-93.
Gronim, Sara Stidstone. “What Jane Knew: A Woman Botanist in the Eighteenth Century.” Journal of Women’s History 19 (2007): 33-59.
Harrison, Mary. “Jane Colden: Colonial American Botanist.” Arnoldia 55 (1995): 19-26.
Parrish, Susan Scott. “Women’s Nature: Curiosity, Pastoral, and the New Science in British America.” Early American Literature 37 (2002): 195-245.
Parrish, Susan Scott. American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial Atlantic World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
Smith, Beatrice Scheer. “Jane Colden (1724-1766) and Her Botanic Manuscript.” American Journal of Botany 75 (1988): 1090-1096.
Tolles, Frederick B. “Philadelphia’s First Scientist: James Logan.” Isis 47 (1956): 20-30.
Tully, Alan. Forming American Politics: Ideals, Interests, and Institutions in Colonial New York and Pennsylvania. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.