and, throughout the peninsula’s southern interior, seas of relatively undis-
turbed wetlands. Fishman is just old enough, in other words, to have experi-
enced enchantment and then lost its sources and sensation. Her recourses
have been conservation action and study—of old landscape photographs,
drawings, paintings, and writings. During the late s she developed an
idea for a book that perfectly suits our nostalgic and disaffected situation.
The result, published in , is tellingly calledJourneys through Paradise:
Pioneering Naturalists in the Southeast.
Fishman reread the journals, memoirs, books, and sometimes the pri-
vate letters of ‘‘classic’’ naturalists who visited or lived in and portrayed the
American South. These included the famous Bartrams, John and William,
of course, and Mark Catesby (–), the Englishman who spent time
in Williamsburg as a young fellow, then returned and stayed longer in
Charleston and the lower South, plus Bermuda. She also read André Mi-
chaux (–?), the adventurous French botanical collector; J. J. Audu-
bon; and John Muir (–), the eccentric who walked from Indiana to
Florida in and wrote an engrossing book about it after he walked to
California. Fishman’s traveling scheme, once her reading was done, was
to revisit her naturalists’ best or most interesting sites. Bartram’sTravels
in hand, for instance, she found a friend with a boat and sailed the middle
leg of St. Johns River. Mostly she seems to have spent much of and
dashing about Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina in her car, as one
might expect.
To her credit, Fishman chose also to feature less well-known men, sig-
nificant scientists anyway, a few of whom acted as strangely as William
Bartram and John Muir. John Abbot (–) was a London attorney
who abandoned his profession in order to collect insects in Virginia and
Georgia. Like many naturalists, he was gifted at drawing and painting, pro-
ducing luminously lifelike beetles. Hardy Bryan Croom (–) was
a university-educated planter at New Bern, North Carolina, who with a
brother migrated to northwestern Florida and established new plantations
near the Apalachicola River. Botany was Croom’s passion, and wealth freed
him to become a fine taxonomist and brilliant gardener. Alvan Wentworth
Chapman (–) was a tall Yankee physician who began to collect plants
early in life, before he moved to the Gulf port town of Apalachicola. Chap-
man’sFlora of the Southern United States() was the standard on the sub-
ject until the appearance of John Kunkel Small’sFlora of the Southeastern
United Statesin . Small (–) is another of Fishman’s subjects.
Pennsylvania-born, he was a professional botanist (not merely a botanizer),