Background
Frederick Traugott Pursh was born on February 4, 1774, in Saxony, at Grossenhain, Germany.
Benjamin Smith Barton, 1766 – 1815, American botanist and naturalist.
Johann Heinrich Seidel, German botanist, horticulturist, 1744-1815.
https://www.amazon.com/Flora-Americae-Septentrionalis-Arrangement-Description/dp/1362504572?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1362504572
1814
Botanist horticulturist scientist writer
Frederick Traugott Pursh was born on February 4, 1774, in Saxony, at Grossenhain, Germany.
Frederick Pursh obtained a public-school education at Grossenhain. Later he was educated at Dresden Botanical Gardens.
After studying horticulture under the court gardener, Johann Heinrich Seidel, Pursh joined the staff of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Dresden. In January 1799 he sailed for the United States, and, according to his own statement, he was first employed at a garden near Baltimore. In 1803 he succeeded John Lyon at “The Woodlands,” the estate near Philadelphia of William Hamilton (1745-1813). In Thomas Jefferson’s opinion, the estate was “the only rival in America to what may be seen in England”.
Among Hamilton’s visitors was Benjamin Smith Barton, who, among his many projects, planned a flora of North America to include the discoveries of Lewis and Clark. Barton employed Pursh on the first extended botanical exploration of North America sponsored by an American. In 1806 Pursh botanized as far south as the North Carolina line. The following year he journeyed to Niagara Falls and east to Rutland, Vermont. Upon his return, but not before reading the proof and checking synonymy for some of Barton’s publications, he left his patron to lodge with the Philadelphia nurseryman Bernard M’Mahon, who with Hamilton had been entrusted with the living novelties brought back from the Pacific Northwest by Lewis and Clark. Barton was to prepare the natural history account while Pursh was to assist with the plant descriptions and drawings, but Barton was overcommitted and made too little progress. Discouraged, Pursh in April 1809 took employment with the physician David Hosack, then developing his Elgin Botanic Garden near New York City.
Hosack, like Barton, envisioned an “American Botany, or a Flora of the United States,” but that, too, did not materialize. During 1810-1811, while awaiting hoped-for financial support from the state, Pursh visited five islands of the West Indies for his health. He returned to Wiscasset, Maine, and visited William Dandridge Peck of Harvard.
Pursh sailed from New York for England, since Hosack had been unable to raise support. He took with him notes, drawings, and selected specimens, some of which were scissored from the Lewis and Clark gatherings in Barton’s care.
In England Pursh came under the patronage of Aylmer Bourke Lambert, a wealthy cabinet-naturalist, and, reputedly fortified with quantities of spirits, completed his Flora Americae Septentrionalis (1814). The collections of Lambert and Joseph Banks were utilized, and the Sherardian Herbarium at Oxford was searched. Altogether the records of forty-one collectors were cited, a notable achievement. Among the genera he named is Lewisia named for Meriwether Lewis.
Although Pursh’s Flora was sometimes disparaged for its inadequacies, it spurred the publication of Nuttall’s Genera (1818). Darlington praised the Flora in 1827 as a “valuable work and the spirit of botanical research which it has excited amongst us.”
Following his involvement with the publication of catalogs of the gardens of Cambridge, England, and of Count Orlov in St. Petersburg, Pursh was offered the curatorship of the newly launched botanic garden at Yale but declined. He was invited to accompany the exploration of the Red River by Thomas Douglas, fifth earl of Selkirk, but the expedition was abandoned after the murder of the leader Robert Semple. From 1816 Pursh lived in Montreal working desultorily on a flora of Canada. He botanized on Anticosti Island in 1818 and assisted the Scot John Goldie in his collecting, but that winter specimens not already shipped to Lambert (and probably notes accompanying) were destroyed by fire. Discouraged, destitute, and dependent during those years on the charity of friends, Pursh died at the age of forty-six.
Frederick Pursh was the author of famous work Flora Americae Septentrionalis, it was the first complete flora of America north of Mexico, and for a generation remained the standard work. He wrote about many new species brought back from the transcontinental expedition to the Columbia River, these the first to be described from the western interior. Aside from his Flora, Pursh is known chiefly from his Journal of a Botanical Excursion in the Northeastern Parts of the States of Pennsylvania and New York (1869). Dying at forty-five, he left, nevertheless, a deep and permanent impress on North American descriptive botany.
Pursh had kind nature and botanical acumen, possessed remarkable perseverance under adverse circumstances.
Quotes from others about the person
Benjamin Silliman, who met Pursh in 1819, wrote that “his conversation was full of fire, point, and energy; and, although not polished, he was good humored, frank, and generous.”
Hosack wrote of Pursh in Hortus Elginensis: “I shall have a very industrious and skillful botanist to collect from different parts of the Union such plants as have not yet been assembled at the Botanic Garden.”
There is no information about his marital status.
1744-1815
