Jane Colden's Botanic Manuscript

Jane Colden (1724-1760) was America's first woman botanist, yet her contributions to the field of early American botany remain little-known and her writings are mostly unpublished. This full account of her life and work comes from her writing, her father's correspondence, and botanic sources of the 18th century.

Born into an educated family of Scottish heritage, Jane's interest in botany began at an early age, following the example of her father, Dr. Cadwallader Colden, to study and classify the plants of New York's Hudson Valley. Having learned the Linnaean system of plant classification, Dr. Colden passed this knowledge onto his daughter, whose acute powers of observation enabled her to create detailed descriptions and illustrations of over 300 plant species in the province of New York. By the time of her death, her Botanic Manuscript remained a work-in-progress, little-appreciated beyond European botany circles.

Richly illustrated with her own sketches and handwriting, this volume presents a full examination of Colden's Manuscript, its important contributions to the early study of America's flora, and, three hundred years after her birth, restores Colden's legacy as one the country's great botanists.

Fenella Greig Heckscher's interest in biology began with the study of wildflowers as a child in England. She went on to study zoology at Oxford University, and then practiced medicine in New York. From there, she and her husband, Morrison Heckscher, moved to a historic house in New York's Hudson Valley, which offered a landscape of wildflowers waiting to be explored, as well as opportunities to meet new gardening friends. She learned of Jane Colden and her Botanic Manuscript at a meeting of the Garden Club of America, and became fascinated by Colden's descriptions of plants native to the United States. Since her retirement from medical practice, she has devoted much of her time to the study of Jane Colden's contributions to the American botanical Enlightenment.