There is a painting by Asher Brown Durand called "Kindred Spirits," which is often
reproduced in books when the subject turns to the American landscape in the nineteenth
century. Painted in 1849, it shows two men standing on a rock ledge in the Catskills in
one of those sublime lost world settings that look as if they would take an expedition to
reach, though the two figures in the painting are dressed, incongruously, as if for the
office, in long coats and plump cravats. Below them, in a shadowy chasm, a stream
dashes through a jumble of boulders. Beyond, glimpsed through a canopy of leaves, is a
long view of gorgeously forbidding blue mountains. To right and left, jostling into frame,
are disorderly ranks of trees, which immediately vanish into consuming darkness.
I can't tell you how much I would like to step into that view. The scene is so manifestly
untamed, so full of an impenetrable beyond, as to present a clearly foolhardy temptation.
You would die out there for sure--shredded by a cougar or thudded with a tomahawk or
just left to wander to a stumbling, confounded death. You can see that at a glance. But
never mind. Already you are studying the foreground for a way down to the stream over
the steep rocks and wondering if that notch ahead will get you through to the neighboring
valley. Farewell, my friends. Destiny calls. Don't wait supper.
Nothing like that view exists now, of course. Perhaps it never did. Who knows how
much license these romantic johnnies took with their stabbing paintbrushes? Who, after
all, is going to struggle with an easel and campstool and box of paints to some difficult
overlook, on a hot July afternoon, in a wilderness filled with danger, and not paint
something exquisite and grand?
But even if the preindustrialized Appalachians were only half as wild and dramatic as in
the paintings of Durand and others like him, they must have been something to behold. It
is hard to imagine now how little known, how full of possibility, the world beyond the
eastern seaboard once was. When Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark into the
wilderness, he confidently expected them to find woolly mammoths and mastodons. Had
dinosaurs been known, he would almost certainly have asked them to bring him home a
triceratops.
The first people to venture deep into the woods from the East (the Indians, of course, had
got there perhaps as much as 20,000 years before them) weren't looking for prehistoric
creatures or passages to the West or new lands to settle. They were looking for plants.
America's botanical possibilities excited Europeans inordinately, and there was both glory
and money to be made out in the woods. The eastern woods teemed with flora unknown
to the Old World, and there was a huge eagerness, from scientists and amateur
enthusiasts alike, to get a piece of it. Imagine if tomorrow a spaceship found a jungle
growing beneath the gassy clouds of Venus. Think what Bill Gates, say, would pay for
some tendriled, purply lobed piece of Venusian exotica to put in a pot in his greenhouse.
That was the rhododendron in the eighteenth century--and the camellia, the hydrangea,
the wild cherry, the rudbeckia, the azalea, the aster, the ostrich fern, the catalpa, the
spice bush, the Venus flytrap, the Virginia creeper, the euphorbia. These and hundreds
more were collected in the American woods, shipped across the ocean to England and
France and Russia, and received with greedy keenness and trembling fingers.
It started with John Bartram (actually, it started with tobacco, but in a scientific sense
it started with John Bartram), a Pennsylvania Quaker, born in 1699, who grew interested