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The impulse to cultivate a New France produced deep and lasting footprints in the human and natural histories of North America. Yet it is a different environmental history of northern North America than has often been told. The gardens of Québec might seem strange places from which to proceed, when the French colonized regions of the continent that many are more likely to associate with cold-weather animals such as cod and beaver than they are to associate them with delicate plants and verdant landscapes.35 In spite of the work of generations of historians who have dug down into the rich archives of agricultural settlement along the Saint Lawrence River and brought a colonial project that was firmly committed to agricultural development to light, we nonetheless remain more likely to think of the region as a wintry white rather than in shades of green and brown.36 We might ask what room there was for gardens in what one scholar has recently characterized as a “reluctant land.”37 Yet if we notice how Sagard’s narrative draws out as he described his order’s garden or how some of the white space on Champlain’s maps was filled in with his, we must appreciate the cultural and intellectual significance of these sorts of cultivated landscapes for French colonists. Inhabiting these sites and describing them for Atlantic audiences helped these authors conceptualize what colonialism could be in North America as well as their own place in its unfolding history.
Producing these cultivated spaces foregrounded environmental encounters in New France as a central way to know and claim colonial North America. Horticulture was a political act as well as a necessity for survival. The early architects of French colonial expansion in North America possessed a worldview that, anachronistically, we might call ecological. Cultivation offered early modern French colonists a capacious language with which to describe the interrelatedness of the human and natural environments discovered there—the culture of American peoples and the culture of American places—and to propose colonialism as a process that would transform them both. Frenchness was a quality that applied to both specific peoples and places and that could be brought out with diligent attention.38 In this, the French who came to North America possessed a worldview that strangely mirrors our own. We, in a time of ecological crisis, find ourselves confronted with phenomena such as global warming that we recognize as neither wholly natural nor entirely social and that, in effect, have forced us to come to terms with the entanglements of the non-human and human worlds and the limits of anthropocentric approaches to understanding and inhabiting the world in which we live.39 The character of French texts in which the weather, plants, and animals are agents in the history of colonial expansion and development can nonetheless be startling. For what strikes the reader of the accounts of early colonists, missionaries, and explorers is the extent to which these actors expected to encounter the agency of American environments and how they anticipated interaction with the world around them. In truth, we cannot say that the environment was simply acted upon by colonialism or the inverse. Colonialism and colonial experience in New France emerged through complex negotiations with place.
This is the horizon that cultivation opens for us here. The French colonists who came to northeastern North America to cultivate a New France mapped a distinction between cultivated and sauvage onto North American places and peoples.40 These were lands that had been shaped by millennia of indigenous cultivation and that continued to be shaped by peoples whose ecological practices had drawn out the richness of northern environments, but colonial texts effaced indigenous labor that had coaxed the expansion of temperate flora. Colonists read evolutionary and geological histories that had produced ecological affinities between the environments of New France and Old in such a way as to justify the imposition of French colonialism. They anticipated the resistance of a wild animal bucking efforts at domestication, and they forgave themselves the violence of pruning, grafting, and transplanting in advance. The language of cultivation translated these activities into the establishment of a mutually beneficial patriarchal order and colonial dispossession into the fantasy of a well-managed agricultural estate. The sites in which these exchanges (and confrontations) took place were privileged in the texts that communicated New France to Europe as they became evidence of the extent to which French colonialism differed from the violent conquests of the Spanish in Central and South America.41 Cultivation became the self-legitimating practice of French settler colonialism, transferring sovereignty and authority to colonists and missionaries who adopted the role of cultivator and benevolent patriarch.42 The production of knowledge in material space and through material practice encourages us to see that it too had a footprint.43 Representing the New World changed it and all the people who claimed it for their own.
The colonists, missionaries, merchants, and administrators who came to New France were part of a broader Atlantic culture that increasingly valued empirical observation and numbered among those in the Americas who were becoming more confident in their ability to know extra-European environments.44 The French authors who positioned themselves as cultivators paid close attention to the question of where and how knowledge was produced, and they claimed an epistemological privilege by virtue of their geographical location. They were participants in a broader valorization of empirical study of the natural world then underway throughout the Atlantic world.45 If there is nothing in this statement that could not be (and has not been) written about colonists in other Atlantic empires, focusing on cultivation directs us to consider how intellectual revolutions in the Atlantic world produced local and regional histories in environmentally distinct regions of the Americas. As colonists such as Champlain claimed that the sauvage nature of American flora was neither natural nor necessary, they foregrounded experiences gathered through touch, taste, smell, and sight to promise that an essential familiarity lay behind apparent differences in American environments; this was the essential act of an agricultural alchemy that transmuted colonialism into cultivation.46
French colonialism effaced indigenous labor and delegitimated indigenous knowledge as its architects suggested American environments remained unfinished and even unnatural. Throughout the wider Atlantic world, the boundaries that divided nature from artifice or from the preternatural or unnatural were contested and defined in practice.47 The question of the natural was particularly problematic in a colonial context where French authors (and authorities) looked to representations of indigenous culture and environments to justify settlement and colonialism. Producing and policing a firm distinction between the sauvage and the natural was, then, the central function of French colonial political ecology in this period. Cultivation provided both a method of study and a means of intervention.
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Many scholars have assumed that the self-evident novelty of North America posed a significant challenge to European intellectual traditions that, built on Aristotelian insights into the natural world, were unable to grapple with the diversity and difference of American nature. At the very least, according to this view, the experience of American difference severely challenged the validity of classical sources that had long defined the flora and fauna of the Old World.48 Yet while plants and animals both marvelous and monstrous may have posed a significant intellectual problem for Christopher Columbus and later explorers of Spanish territories in Central and South America, French colonists and missionaries had a fundamentally different experience of North American environments that appeared strangely familiar at first encounter. French settlers, traders, and missionaries discovered new places in the early seventeenth century that they considered novel in the way of the Terre neuve or Newfoundland located just to the northeast of New France. Yet novelty in the way that it would be later articulated by Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon—as a chronologically new continent, manifestly different from a more familiar, knowable, and reliable Old World—was a conceptual impossibility within a worldview that insisted on the mutability of American difference.49 It was only gradually that both colonial and metropolitan authors struggled with how to adequately capture (and contain) this American difference, opening up spaces where new forms of knowledge could be articulated and initiating a broader discussion of natural difference in French North America.
Moments of shock or marvel are rare in the accounts of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New France. Instead, we are presented with historical