No. 93

The Jane Colden manuscript containing her over 300 descriptions and drawings of Hudson Valley plants is held in the collection of the British Natural History Museum. In 1963 the Garden Clubs of Dutchess and Orange counties in New York published a reproduction of Jane’s manuscript with a selection of her original entries. It’s wonderful that we have this for reference and it enables us to read her detailed entries for the approximately 60 plants selected. Unfortunately the reproductions are somewhat crude and show none of the subtlety described by Dr. Karen Reeds, a Linnaeus expert, who spent an afternoon comparing the original with the facsimile. According to Dr. Reeds the original displays a delicate line quality and watercolor washes that have been lost in the reproduction. Fortunately Jane’s text is reproduced both in her original handwriting and in transcription, allowing her careful observation and powers of description to shine through. Her entry for Pokeweed concludes with the following:

The flowers grow in Spickes upon the top, of small naked bran-

ches, set opposite to the Leaves, each flower upon a Foot Stalk

set alternately of with two or three small colour’d Leaves, set

upon the foot Stalks. They are white at first opening, and

likewise their foot Stalks & the Stalk of the spike, but

as the fruit ripens, they all turn a dark red.

Flower in July

The Phytolacca Root is very useful in the use of cancirs

some curious persons in England have endeavoured to propogate this

plant by the Seed braigth from America, but could not produce

any plant from the Seed.

The propagation from this plant is maket in America in the

Dung of birds. For this reason it may be necessary, to give

in Europe the berries to birds, & to plant the Seeds with

the Dung of the fowls, through which they pass intire

Jane’s handwriting is beautiful and the handwritten pages permit me to imagine her at work carefully recording her observations. Unfortunately, the harshness of the 1963 reproductions prevent me from following this flight of imagination very far so, using her handwritten entries, I have made new pages for Jane’s manuscript. The page here is entry No. 93. Phytolacca decandra Poke Weed.

At Home

The American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the perfect place to look at colonial American furnishings. Besides the period rooms, there is open storage that translates into rows of glass cases filled with multiple examples of household furnishings. The computer banks allow for specific searches and when asked for what was made prior to 1800 came up with lots of examples of silver tankards and spoons, pewter plates and porrigers, all produced in New York City. There is also a decent sampling of Chinese import plates and platters and English porcelain that I would imagine Jane’s parents, being Scottish and also Royalist, might favor.

I was struck with how beautiful the objects are and realized I was responding not to the design but to the materials. Everything was metal, glass, wood, ceramic, or natural fibers. The computers were the only plastic objects to be seen.

Father Daughter Botany

Jane began identifying and describing plants at the request of her father who himself had been involved in botanical study before abandoning it for other projects. When he returned to the field in his sixties, he felt he was too old and eyesight too poor to continue and he turned to Jane to carry out the work. While it seems Cadwallader’s goals in pursuing botany had at least partly to do with securing himself a name in intellectual circles, Jane’s goals are less easy to define. Initially she seems reluctant and in her first year only described 12 plants, primarily common ones easily found nearby. This seems a weak attempt to perhaps please her ambitious father. In 1753, however, she described 140 plants, all but 8 in extensive detail and then continued to collect in swamps, woods and thickets through 1756 when the Seven Year War made in unsafe to continue. She mastered the Linnaean system and proved to have remarkable powers of observation and description surpassing her father’s efforts in both quantity and detail. In a period when gentlewomen were expected to be conversant about the new sciences primarily to provide an attentive audience, Jane took on the actual work of scientific enquiry and from all evidence, found that work thrilling.

The Orchard

The Colden family cemetery once sat in an extensive orchard located to the east of the original Colden house. According to the letters and papers of Jane’s father the orchard produced cherries, pears, nectarines, peaches and later grew plum and apricot trees that were a gift from John Bartram. The apple varieties included Spitzenberghs, Newtown Pippins, Golden Russets, Pomroy, Golden Rennet and Kentish Codlings. The full name of the Spitzenbergh was probably Esopus Spitzenbergh, an apple that was found in the early 18^th century in the Ulster County town of Esopus not very far north of Coldengham and very close to where I live.

Apple trees are grown either from seeds or by grafting. Seedlings often stray widely from their genetic origins producing an array of apple types often unusable for much besides cider of which American settlers drank a good deal. Sometimes, however, a seedling grows that produces a superior apple and that tree would be grafted to others to produce the now sought after apple. Esopus Spitzenberghs were such a type and it’s said to have been the favorite apple of Thomas Jefferson. Where this information comes from I’m not sure, but I do see the trees listed, amongst others, in his farm and garden diaries. The Colden family obtained both seedlings and apple scions for grafting from their Hudson Valley neighbors and ate the apples fresh, dried for winter, and turned into hard cider.

You won’t find Esopus Spitzenburgh or other evocatively named old varieties in your grocery store. Most commercial apples come from the same small group of parents making for uniformity in both genes and taste. This makes apples particularly vulnerable to attack, similar to the attack on the potato in Ireland in the 1840’s and eliminates the variety of tastes available from a diverse apple crop. Fortunately, there is a sea change taking place in the way we think about food and how it’s grown and distributed. In fact this sea change in many ways returns us to the way food was grown and eaten during Jane Colden’s life; producing diverse crops that are appropriate to the local climate and consuming it not far from it’s source.

It’s now possible to buy heirloom variety fruit trees in nurseries. In current nursery catalogues and foody websites the Esopus Spitzenburgh is described as aromatic, spicy and crisp, or having floral notes and hints of peach and perhaps pineapple. Sounds delicious. I wonder if Jane, having eaten this apple, would agree.