A Not-So-New World. Christopher M. Parsons

French access to American naturalia, but increased access did not necessarily translate into greater knowledge about North America. French naturalists such as the Provence-based Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc were able to personally observe and experience North American animals such as the caribou, the hummingbird, and a horseshoe crab that had been brought back by early Acadian settlers such as de Monts.⁵⁰ These North American animals joined collections that also included cultural artifacts such as canoes, bows and arrows, and the aboriginal weapon known to the French as the casse-tête.⁵¹ They were valued, like other objects with which they were stored and compared, less for their contribution to furthering knowledge about newly claimed or discovered regions of the world than for their novelty and rarity.⁵² The arrival and dissemination of these American plants were therefore part of a much larger culture of curiosity that animated a diverse array of intellectual and commercial activity in the seventeenth century and that was at least equally concerned with geographical breadth as it was precision.⁵³

      Considerable geographical uncertainty limited the impact of flora from northeastern North America. Within scientific genres, the significance of locality remained a debated subject.⁵⁴ Terms used to designate regions of North America such as Canada remained unmoored to specific locations.⁵⁵ Early gardens such as Peiresc’s blended flora from the world over. In a 1630 letter, for example, Peiresc described his garden in the southeast of France as home to “several curious pieces come from the Indies and from Canada and from elsewhere.” Alongside “an orchard of fruit trees where I have more than sixty sort of excellent European apples,” and hyacinths, he noted that his “vine of Canada” had “covered entire houses in three or four years.”⁵⁶ The systematic study of these plants was further limited by their irregular arrival and frequently confused provenance. Peiresc and other collectors could touch, taste, smell, and observe American squash, grapes, and strawberries, but we have little record of where these originated from, nor do we have much information about the identities behind the many hands that would have been needed to transplant them in Peiresc’s southern garden.⁵⁷ In hindsight it is possible to see the stirrings of a botanical science with a particular attention to morphological and geographical specificity, but that was not the goal of collectors such as Peiresc.

      In Paris, it was the efforts of Guy de la Brosse, Jean Robin, and Robin’s son Vespasien in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that established a sizable presence of American plants in the city’s gardens. Both Robins and de la Brosse presided over gardens associated with royal authority and the city’s medical establishments, Jean and Vespasien Robin as gardeners for Henri IV and the city’s medical faculty and de la Brosse as physician to Louis XIII and first director of the Jardin du Roi after it was founded in 1635.⁵⁸ They directed increasingly sophisticated and well-funded gardens that helped the crown establish cultural authority through the skilled display of exotic plants.⁵⁹ Jean Robin, a surgeon by training, had been hired to create a garden for the faculty of medicine in Paris in 1597.⁶⁰ His son Vespasien collected plants throughout Europe and, where they had already been transplanted in European gardens, from the Americas and Asia.⁶¹ Vespasien was later hired as a botanical demonstrator at the Jardin du Roi founded by de la Brosse.⁶² In a 1641 catalogue of the plants that grew in his garden, de La Brosse credited Vespasien with introducing many of the foreign plants, as well as with maintaining the networks through which new seeds and specimens arrived.⁶³

      Vespasien and his father were only two among the many Paris-based gardeners who introduced foreign flora into the French capital in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.⁶⁴ Published catalogues of their gardens allow us to trace the growth in the presence of American plants numerically, even if the source of many of these specimens remains unknowable. In 1601, at least three of the almost 1,300 plants that Robin listed in his Catalogus stirpium tam indigenarum quam exoticarum quae Lutetiae coluntur were identifiably American: an arbor vitae that was first brought back by Jacques Cartier, a Christophoriana that Robin also supplied to the English herbalist John Gerard, and the Aconitum racemosum sive Christophoriana that soon became better known simply as snakeroot.⁶⁵ If only a few were positively North American, many were rare and came to Jean through extensive networks that he cultivated with other collectors and that connected him with plants that were arriving from French, Spanish, Dutch, and English colonies in the Americas.⁶⁶ Within the first decades of the seventeenth century, he built a sizable collection that would later form the basis of the Jardin du Roi.⁶⁷

      Yet it would be a mistake to assume that the American origins of these plants were prized or that their cultivation supported conversations about colonialism in the places from which they had come. Jean Robin’s association with Robinia pseudoacacia, also known as the Black Locust, for example, reveals the relative unimportance of origin to these collections. Jean is frequently acknowledged as having introduced the plant into Paris—and more specifically into the Left Bank garden of the Paris medical faculty near Notre Dame Cathedral—in 1601, where it grows to this day.⁶⁸ His son Vespasien planted another long-lived example from the seeds of this first R. pseudoacacia in 1636 in the Jardin du Roi where he worked as a botanical demonstrator and arborist.⁶⁹ The tree soon spread roots beyond the confines of Paris, although the eighteenth-century amateur botanist Joseph-Pierre Buc’hoz wrote that early experiments with planting the tree along French rural allées failed; unfortunately, he wrote, the branches broke “easily in the lightest wind,” although parts of the tree were eventually used both medicinally and for woodworking.⁷⁰ Over a century after the first example of the tree was growing in Paris, Carolus Linnaeus attached Robin’s name to what by then was increasingly known as a false acacia.⁷¹

      Yet the exact origins of the tree planted in 1601 remain unknown and disputed to this day, at least in part because the first name provided—Acacia Americana Robini—failed to identify either a specific region of origin or a vector of its arrival. Some scholars have suggested that the tree was first acquired much later than 1601 from the English naturalist John Tradescant, who had acquired it for himself from Virginia, either from his son John the younger (who traveled to Virginia on a botanizing trip) or from correspondents who had settled in the colony.⁷² Although Champlain might seem to be a possible source, his trip to Mexico and the Caribbean left him far to the south of the tree’s natural range, and his explorations of Acadia and the Saint Lawrence Valley were both too late and too far north.⁷³ In this respect, the uncertain origin of R. pseudoacacia makes it representative of many of the early plants that crossed the Atlantic from North America.

      When Jacques Philippe Cornut produced the first written description and visual image of Robinia pseudoacacia in his 1635 Canadensium plantarum he called it Acacia Americana Robini; but he used the terms “Canada” to represent a far larger region than the present-day country and “America” as a fluid geographical marker more akin to how we today use the term “Americas” (Figure 5).⁷⁴ The text marked a transition between the humanist herbals of the sixteenth century and the regional floras of the seventeenth and the eighteenth. The passages that described the plants and the copper-plate images that represented them were not the product of the circumscribed field trips that would soon come to define regional floras but were instead an effort to expand the geographical coverage of classical botanical authorities.⁷⁵ If he and others of this community of Paris-based natural historians therefore continued to confuse the specific geographical origins of the plants they described, they surely can be forgiven; this was not the task that they took up for themselves or their science.

Figure 5. Jacques-Philippe Cornut, “Acacia Americana Robini,” Canadensium plantarum, 1635. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.

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      Successful calls to cultivate New France required methods of communication that could simultaneously describe New France for French readers and diagnose its deficiencies. The specimens in Parisian gardens could not accomplish this. If we were to look for an