The renowned artist & naturalist William Bartram was born in in Kingsessing, near Philadelphia in 1739, the son of acclaimed horticulturalist John Bartram. His love of nature & skills of observation & artistry were honed on many botanical collecting trips with his father (Magee, 2019).

With the financial support of the English Quaker, botanist and collector John Fothergill, Bartram undertook an extended expedition to the southeastern United States between 1773 and 1776 “for the discovery of rare & useful productions of nature, chiefly in the vegetable kingdom”.. Exploring Georgia in 1773, he then travelled to Florida the following year before a journey that took him through North Carolina, west Florida, southern Alabama and Mississippi over the following two years. In 1791, Bartram published his Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, an account of those explorations between 1773 and 1776.

The specimens collected by Bartram during his 1773-1776 expedition are preserved at the NHM. They were originally sent to Fothergill, his patron, between 1774 and 1776. An additional set of specimens were sent by Bartram to Robert Barclay (1751-1830), one of the founders of the Linnean Society of London, in 1786. Some of the latter were duplicates that he had retained but others represented species that were not represented in the earlier sets of specimens sent to Fothergill.

The specimens are arranged in seven books as follows:

Book I. East Florida Plants. For Doct. Fothergill London Doct[o]r L. Chalmers. [50 specimens]

Book II. East Florida Plants. [30 specimens]

Book A. For Doctor Fothergill. Specimens. Plants of Province of Georgia. [30 specimens]

Book B. On way to Cherokee Country. [52 specimens]

Book C. For Doctr Fothergill. Remarks on the Specimens of Plants natives of So. Carolina. [26 specimens]

Book [D]. [Presumably West Florida]. [19 specimens]

Book [E]. Mr Barclay’s Book. [38 specimens]

Many of the specimens have detailed notes accompanying them. For the most part, the original folios have been remounted onto larger herbarium sheets and are housed in the botany historical collections room, in their original book order. Within each book, specimens are numbered. Twelve specimens, nearly all recognised as types, were removed from that collection and are now housed in the General Herbarium although the notes that accompanied the specimen remain with the other specimens. Among those housed in the General Herbarium are the types of species described by Bartram, including Franklinia alatamaha Bartram and Hydrangea quercifolia W.Bartram.

The binomial names used here largely follow those of Joseph Ewan, who published a detailed account of the collection in Ewan (1968) that included transcriptions of the notes that accompanied the specimens.

Specimens in the William Bartram Herbarium. To access, click on the ‘Go to resource’ button below. You can access the collection in three ways. The table view displays the collection in table format; the list view shows the data accompanying each specimen, together with a thumbnail of the image of the specimen sheet; gallery view allows you to browse the images and access the dataset in that way.

Images carry a CC-BY licence and can be downloaded at full resolution. For details regarding terms and conditions of resuse, please see: https://data.nhm.ac.uk/terms-conditions

References

Ewan, J., 1968. William Bartram: Botanical and Zoological Drawings, 1756-1788. American Philosophical Society.

Magee, J., 2019. William Bartram – The first ecologist. In: Anon. Nature’s Explorers – Adventurers who recorded the wonder of the natural world. The Natural History Museum, London. Pp 36-45.