1728 John Bartram (1699-1777) Buys Pennsylvania Garden & Begins Collecting Plants

Quaker John Bartram (1699-1777) started America's 1st & most famous botanical garden on the Schuylkill River just below Philadelphia. Hailed as "the father of American Botany," Bartram sent more than 320 species of plants to England. In 1759, the Pennsylvania Quaker sent this plan of his garden to London merchant Peter Collinson (1694–1768). 

John Bartram founded his botanical Garden in the autumn of 1728, when the elder Bartram purchased an improved farm of a little over 100 acres on the lower Schuylkill. This farm had been part of a much larger plantation on the west bank of the Schuylkill known as Aronameck, 1st occupied in 1648, during the Swedish colonial settlement of the Delaware Valley. Bartram, a third-generation Pennsylvania Quaker, from nearby Darby, began the construction of a stone farmhouse soon after the purchase, whose initial manifestation was completed by 1731. Bartram probably 1st planted a kitchen garden at the site in 1729.

Bartram may have chosen the site with the intention of establishing a large garden, & the location remains well suited to the cultivation of plants today. The initial garden was probably laid out at six or seven acres, & expanded to as large as ten acres in succeeding generations. Additional space was set aside for an orchard, greenhouses & framing, & nursery beds, which totaled as much as twelve acres at the peak of the garden in the 1830s.  

Bartram’s garden began as a personal garden, but grew to a systematic collection of native & exotic plants as Bartram devoted more time to exploration & discovery. Exchanges of plants & seeds from gardens in North America & abroad also fueled the collection. Although not the first botanic collection in North America, by the middle of the 18C, Bartram’s Garden contained the most varied collection of North American plants in the world.

Around 1733, in an event important to the general history of horticulture & natural science, John Bartram introduced himself via letter to London merchant Peter Collinson (1694–1768), & the two began a lifelong correspondence. Collinson, a member of the Royal Society, & like Bartram a Quaker & an enthusiastic gardener, became the middleman to a scientific trade in seeds, plants, & natural history specimens. Plants from Bartram’s Philadelphia garden were exchanged with a range of botanists, gardeners, & nurserymen in London & throughout Europe. Collinson also arranged funding from patrons among the British elite, which allowed Bartram to leave his farm & go plant hunting. 

During his career John Bartram traveled widely throughout the British colonies in North America—plant collecting began in the Mid-Atlantic colonies of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, & Maryland. In time, Bartram traveled north to New York & New England, & south to Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia & Florida, exploring a region spanning from Lake Ontario in New York to the St. John’s River in Florida, & from the Atlantic coast to the Ohio valley.

Historic American Landscapes Survey - John Bartram House and Garden by Joel T. Fry