Dreaming of Rediscovery: Botanists, Extinction, and the Tree That Sets the Brain on Fire (2022)
The early nineteenth-century extinction of Franklinia alatamaha is quite possibly the first species loss recorded on American soil. Yet few scholars have included the plant within American dialogues on extinction. Because it continued to be cultivated in gardens after it was extinct in the wild, its story contradicts the traditional declension and ascension narratives, and so opens a new lens into the understanding of scientific ideas about environmental change. Beginning with William Bartram’s collection of the species at the end of the eighteenth century, and ending with Edgar Wherry’s ecologically informed searches for surviving Franklinia in the early twentieth century, this essay examines botanists who believed Franklinia might still grow naturally a century after its last sighting. Their rediscovery expeditions reveal a value in species wildness, even while acknowledging its habitat was not wilderness. This history extends extinction stories beyond animal species, to illuminate the origins of understandings of species loss through the voices and actions of botanists whose practice of propagation saved this species, but whose imaginations still wishfully envisioned Franklinia in the wild.
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