Embroidered orchards and peony hair ornaments testify that women were practitioners of floral display, but many women sought knowledge as well as style. Linnaean taxonomy gave order to the botanical world; plants could be identified and classified by anyone once they mastered Linnaeus’s straightforward system based on the sexual characteristics of plants. Jane Colden is perhaps the best example of an eighteenth-century American woman who diligently studied the Linnaean system (albeit in English rather than Latin). As a teenager living with her father, the scientist Cadwallader Colden, in New York’s Hudson Valley, she put her knowledge into practice by classifying over 300 species of local plants in the 1750s. British collector Peter Collinson learned of Jane Colden’s achievements through correspondence with her father, and Collinson passed on to Linnaeus himself the fact that Jane Colden was “perhaps the first lady that has perfectly studied Linnaeus’ system.” Colden continued her botanical studies up until her marriage, at age thirty-five, in 1759. She passed away the following year. Her notebook, carefully preserved by her family, eventually found its way into the Natural History Museum in London.
How could a woman on the periphery of empire have mastered the precepts of botanical science? Print culture provides at least part of the answer. Colden read some of the imported botanical texts available to Americans through direct shipments from overseas acquaintances. Her father requested Peter Collinson to send a variety of botanical illustrations and texts from London: “As [she] cannot have the opportunity of seeing plants in a Botanical Garden I think the next best is to see the best cuts or pictures of them for which purpose I would buy for her Tournefort’s Institutiones [Rei] Herbariae, Morison’s Historia Plantarum, or if you know any better books for this purpose as you are a better judge than I am will be obliged to you in making this choice.” By the close of the eighteenth century, British women authored as well as read botanical texts. Priscilla Wakefield’s An Introduction to Botany, in a Familiar Series of Letters (1796) was the first of many instruction books aimed at an amateur reader. Sarah Fitton’s Conversations on Botany (1817) and Jane Marcet’s Conversations on Vegetable Physiology (1829) were among the most popular works in the early nineteenth century, competing with Wakefield’s text, which continued to appear on booksellers’ lists. Occasionally we can document that specific American women read these works: Philadelphian Rueben Haines kept a lending record of his books. In 1805 his friends Martha Robeson, Susan Emlen and Lydia Coates each borrowed Wakefield’s An Introduction to Botany. The titles suggest why these books appealed to women: all three authors placed botanical instruction within an intimate setting; learning botany was something to do within a circle of friends (such as the epistolary correspondence of Wakefield’s characters), or between a mother and child (in Fitton’s book, a mother talks with her young son). Learning was conversation, rather than a rigorous drill. Nevertheless, all three authors emphasized that botanic study was an active exercise, one ideally performed out of doors. Wakefield encouraged her readers to leave the parlor and walk among the plants, and to examine living samples with a microscope small enough to fit in a female pocket.