HISTORICAL NOTES 7 



in existence. He and his son collected chiefly on the mountains of the 

 S.E. United States. 



Contemporary with the Bartrams was Andre Michaux (1746-1803), a- 

 Frenchman who resided in America from 1 785 to 1 796. He travelled much 

 in eastern N. America, and was the first to introduce many of the trees 

 and shrubs of that region to Europe. They were sent to France, and 

 some of the trees raised from his seed may still be seen in the gardens 

 of the Petit Trianon. 



The foundation of the Botanical Magazine by William Curtis 

 (1746-99) in 1787 is an event that merits a passing notice. It has 

 appeared once a month from that date up to the present time, each 

 number giving five or six coloured plates of plants, accompanied by 

 descriptions in Latin and English. Up to the present over 8500 plates 

 have appeared, a considerable proportion of which depict haldy trees and 

 shrubs, as may be judged from the frequent quotation of plates I have 

 made. 



Among nurserymen of the eighteenth century, those whose fame 

 persists in connection with our present subject are : James Gordon, 

 who was one time gardener to the Lord Petre aforementioned. About 

 1750 he established a nursery at Mile End., He introduced Ulmus 

 americana, Sophora japonica (one of his original trees, introduced in 

 1753, is still healthy at Kew), and the maidenhair tree. James Lee 

 (1715-95), in partnership with one Kennedy, founded a nursery at 

 Hammersmith (Olympia now partly covers the site), which ultimately 

 became the finest in the kingdom. The firm did not finally disappear 

 until about the beginning of the twentieth century. A German named 

 Conrad Loddiges started as a nurseryman at Hackney in 1771 and 

 established a business which, so far as hardy trees and shrubs are 

 concerned, became by far the most important in the British Isles. It was 

 on the collections maintained by this firm more than any other that J. C. 

 London relied for living material in the preparation of his great work in 

 l8 35'37- This firm, equally famous as cultivators and introducers of 

 orchids and greenhouse plants, continued to exist until the middle of the 

 nineteenth century. 



In 1772 the first of professional plant collectors, Francis Masson, 

 was sent out from Kew to the Cape of Good Hope. From that time until 

 1862 a succession, sometimes interrupted, of plant collectors went out 

 from Kew to many parts of the world. But it must be admitted that 

 their work, largely guided and fostered in those early years by Sir Joseph 

 Banks (1743-1820), went on more in tropical and subtropical countries 

 than in those whence plants hardy in this country come. Altogether 

 about 500 new hardy trees and shrubs were introduced in the eighteenth 

 century, three-fifths of them from N. America. 



