Fall into Bartram’s Garden

By Maitreyi Roy

Every season is beautiful here at Bartram’s Garden, but there’s something especially inviting about the fall: I love to see the bustling return of school groups, the joy of our autumn celebrations like Indigenous People’s Day and Harvest Fest, and the transformation in the landscape as growers here and throughout the neighborhood prepare for cooler temperatures, fall planting, and abundant harvests. It is a wonderful time of year to gather with friends and neighbors to enjoy the beauties of the season. We are so excited to share our hard work with you, and we hope to see you in the Garden soon!

When you visit, make sure to enjoy all the colors of the fall: check out the bloom calendar in this issue or on our website––or ask at the Welcome Center!––to see what’s in season now throughout these 50 acres. The vibrant flowers of Chrysanthemums, Autumn Crocus, and Franklinia are complemented by equally colorful berries from plants like American Beauty berry and Hearts-A-Burstin’, which support the many birds in our ecosystem. And speaking of birds: fall is migration season, so remember to look up! Binoculars are available to borrow in the Welcome Center, and you can check out the bird sightings in this issue or online to keep track of what you’re spotting.

And, of course, there are the trees! As the weather gets colder, you can find me on ginkgo watch, waiting for the tall, historic Ginkgo Tree to turn a magnificent, glowing yellow. It always seems to happen overnight, like a beacon of much-needed sunshine just when I need it amidst the transition to winter. Fall is also a wonderful season for planting if you are looking to add to the ecosystem of your own home: we are excited to partner with TreePhilly to provide free yard trees for residents in the 19143 and 19142 zip codes, and our ROOTS Tree Crew students will be working with the Southwest Tree Tenders to help expand and strengthen the tree canopy throughout our neighborhood.

There’s plenty to do at Bartram’s Garden this season: stretch your legs during a walk or a bike ride on the Bartram’s Mile Trail with WeWalkPHL or the Bicycle Coalition, create your own masterpiece at an art gathering, learn from the natural world with an herbalism class or a SWWAG workshop, or join us to celebrate, reflect, and share at our upcoming fall festivals. And, of course, we hope we’ll see you in the Garden, making the space your own: it’s a perfect season for a picnic or a walk through the landscape. We hope you’ll try it all! We can’t wait to see you here soon.

Maitreyi Roy is the Executive Director at Bartram’s Garden.

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A Never-Failing Friend: Reflections from a Youth Tree Tender

By Mikaya Woodard

Hi, my name is Mikaya Woodard and I love being a Tree Tender because trees are beautiful. Dealing with trees, personally, it helps me with my personal life and well-being, taking my time, practicing patience, and freedom.

In the Fall, I love to be under the Maple tree because of their leaves and they produce syrup. They can live a long time, from 100 to 400 years old. Sitting near a tree or around it helps me feel relief. Trees help us with stress. They comfort us and provide food and wood. They clean our air and filter our water. They take up carbon dioxide and provide us with oxygen. They are a never-failing friend.

By being a Tree Tender helps me better myself by watching who I hang with, staying on honor roll, being around honest and caring people. And it brings me what I need the most: peace and happiness.

Mikaya is a youth intern in the ROOTS Tree Crew at Bartram’s Garden and is a member of the Southwest Tree Tenders.

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The brilliant colors that leaves take on in fall is one of the most familiar and beloved aspects of the season. As the days grow shorter and colder––not ideal conditions for continued plant growth––the green chemical chlorophyll, which allows leaves to turn sunlight and water into food for themselves, breaks down within the leaves.

What remains are the yellow, red, and orange hues that make fall trees so beautiful. But what causes these colors? Much like chlorophyll lends leaves their green color, other chemical compounds in the leaves provide the colors of autumn.

• YELLOW: Besides chlorophyll, other chemicals constantly present in leaves include flavonoids and carotenoids. These chemicals help with essential leaf functions and protect the chlorophyll from sun damage but are hidden from view until the chlorophyll breaks down in fall. One type of carotenoid, called lutein, is also responsible for the yellow color of egg yolks!
• ORANGE: Carotenoids are also responsible for orange coloration, perhaps most famously in carrots; the word “carotenoid” actually comes from the Latin word for carrot. (Say “carotenoid” out loud and you’ll notice a familiar vegetable in the word!) Carotenoids start breaking down around the same time as chlorophyll, but they do so much more slowly, which is why their orange is still visible after the green from chlorophyll fades.
• RED & PURPLE: Red to purple hues in fall leaves come from a group of chemicals called anthocyanins. Unlike chlorophyll, carotenoids, and flavonoids, anthocyanins are generally not present in leaves during the growing season. They start forming in late summer and early fall, as trees begin to draw nutrients from their leaves up into the tree itself. Their function isn’t well understood; one theory is that they protect leaves from sun damage as trees drain their leaves. Lycopene, one type of anthocyanin, also helps give tomatoes their red color.

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Bringing Back Botanical Wreaths

By Katie Jacoby

On a chilly March morning while I was pruning the American Wisteria vine, a thought began to take shape. These long twining stems could be saved from the compost and transformed into elegant handmade wreaths. They would become the base of our botanical wreath collection, a new addition to our Handmade Holiday wreath sales each November.

The abundance of renewable natural material is everywhere you look, and with a cool dark space to dry our harvest, we hit the ground running. Throughout the growing season, our horticulture team collects and dries grasses, flowers, and seed heads to preserve their natural beauty.

Steel blue globe thistles, hung to dry right before they bloom, retain their color extraordinarily. When shelled, the Lunaria plant’s seed pods look like graceful opaline ovals. The best time to harvest phragmites grass flowers is in late November when their inflorescence is at peak floof.

This practice is intended to honor a more reparative relationship with the natural world. In the past our team has ventured outside of the Garden to harvest evergreen materials for holiday wreath-making. As we begin our shift towards becoming more ecologically responsible, the reality is that our past practices have not always contributed to a sustainable future. In fact, pruning evergreen material is not always able to be done in a way to encourage regeneration of lost limbs. Poor pruning techniques, inopportune timing of pruning, and even the act of transporting evergreen boughs can lead to the spread of unwanted insect populations and disease as well as unhealthy healing processes for these trees.

Dried botanical material offers a much longer shelf life and when cared for properly can provide everlasting beauty. Harvesting exclusively from the Garden allows folks to bring a bit of this landscape home with them and celebrate the many seasons of wonder Bartram’s Garden offers while reducing our carbon footprint.

Bartram’s Garden appreciates your support of best practices for a better future of our region’s biodiversity. As we realign our efforts towards renewable harvests, we plan on sharing these botanical beauties with our annual wreath-making and sale. We hope you’ll join us to celebrate the beauties of the season!

Katie Jacoby is a horticulturalist at Bartram’s Garden.

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• Barefoot Bella
• Nana’s Hook
• Light It Up Candles
• Aisha Toombs
• Soap by Alana
• The Bearded Carver
• Truly Pure and Natural
• Bayt Arij
• Fifth of a Farm Creations
• Soothe x Smooth
• Diana Dinh
• Stacey Woodson
• Instar Apiaries
• Sophie Strachan
• Chi Muse
• Jasbennsart
• Only in the Forest
• Sunniewallflower
• The Random Tea Room
• Serena Niesley
• Honey Blis
• Odabu
• EarlGreyHandmade
• Nyambi Naturals
• Nicole Rodrigues
• Floret Vansguard

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TrailOff is a new, cutting-edge app featuring 10 original audio dramas, totally free-to-download, that unfold on  Circuit Trails across the Philadelphia region. This audio storytelling app puts YOU in the center of the drama! Get out onto a trail and let a 360° world swirl around you. Literally step into the shoes of characters as they run from monsters, uncover clues to mysteries or adventure into unknown secrets from the past in stories synced to you in real-time!

Created by Swim Pony and the PA Environmental Council (PEC), this FREE project aims to diversify the stories we imagine when we think about nature. TrailOff uses your phone’s technology to transport you into an augmented reality world that syncs to your movements as you walk a trail. Each story is uniquely crafted for its site, written by incredible local authors who will explore the way you think about
taking a walk outside. This is NOT your grandma’s nature trail!

This structured 1-mile walk will follow the new Afrofuturist audio drama Chronicles Of Asylum by Philadelphia author and artist Li Sumpter of MythMediaStudios, available for free download through TrailOff:

Set in future Philadelphia circa 2045 on the eve of a major cosmic event, Chronicles of Asylum follows savvy young journalist Liliquoi Brown as she investigates an otherworldly urban myth in hopes of finding two missing visitors to a refugee camp on the Schuylkill River. Exploring survival and sacrifice, home and exile, humanity’s fate and hope for the future, Chronicles follows the path of this unexpected trailblazer.

The story walk will take approximately one hour but can accommodate participants moving at a slower pace.

How To Use

To use TrailOff download the app to your phone, explore the 10 stories, and pick a trail you want to try. In the app, you can download a story and get directions to the trail by car or public transport. Once you arrive hit “Begin” and start walking! During your story, follow the path and directions from the app. If you accidentally stray from the path, a sound will let you know you’ve gone off route. The story will follow YOUR pace, so take as long as you like to explore. If you need to leave, you can always return and pick up where you left off.

After finishing a trail, you’ll even get some bonus features to keep you busy on the walk back!

TrailOff Guided AfroFuturist Story Walk at Bartram’s Garden

You can try a guided TrailOff Walk at Bartram’s Garden during our first Family Outdoor Movie Night of the summer on Friday, June 24, 6-7 pm. This structured 1-mile walk will follow the new Afrofuturist audio drama Chronicles Of Asylum by Philadelphia author and artist Li Sumpter of MythMediaStudios, available for free download now.

   Set in future Philadelphia circa 2045 on the eve of a major cosmic event, Chronicles of 

                                                    Asylum follows savvy young journalist Liliquoi Brown as she investigates an otherworldly

urban myth in hopes of finding two missing visitors to a refugee camp on the Schuylkill River.

Exploring survival and sacrifice, home and exile, humanity’s fate and hope for the future,

                                                    Chronicles follows the path of this unexpected trailblazer.

The story walk will take approximately one hour but can accommodate participants moving at a slower pace, and will finish with a Q&A with the author. Register for this event here.

To learn more about TrailOff, visit its website.

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The film was first released in late 2019 by Eric Breitenbach (director), Scott Auerbach (director of photography), and Dorinda G. Dallmayer (writer), and has been broadcast across the country on public television beginning in 2020. It is currently free and available to view via the South Carolina ETV website. Also available is a review/interview of the documentary by Doug Carlson and Dorinda G. Dallmayer in The Georgia Review. Links to both the film and the review can be found below.

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Aqua Marooned! is a card game created by Philly-based immersive experience company Swim Pony that encourages humor and emotional connection with the flora and fauna of the Lenapehoking region. Bartram’s Garden is one of 20 different regional environmental centers where it premiered at this spring; each location is connected to the Alliance for Watershed Education of the Delaware River (AWE) and has its own unique, location-specific card deck.

How to Play

Though Aqua Marooned! takes inspiration from traditional party games like Apples to Apples and Cards Against Humanity, this card game isn’t one meant to be played sitting at a table indoors.  The game’s beautifully-illustrated cards cast players in groups of three or more as extraterrestrial explorers sent to explore earth’s mysterious “watersphere”, i.e. at your participating AWE nature center, park, or wildlife refuge.

Using vibrant pictures of plants, animals, and the environment, players are sent on a “mission” that playfully invites players to call on their powers of observation, inventiveness, or wit. Card challenges include things that ask players to get creative (Find a dead thing and give it a heartfelt eulogy. Most heartfelt wins.), use their bodies (Race to the nearest body of water), and reflect on the natural world (Define what “nature” is and is not). Though suitable for ages 12 and up, the game is aimed specifically at teens and adults.

Aqua Marooned!’s cards are designed especially for the 23 Centers in the AWE Alliance but can also be played anywhere one finds the outdoors. In addition to the core deck of cards, 20 participating AWE sites have developed expansion decks featuring additional missions that can be folded into the basic game with content unique to their sites. Swim Pony has also developed a super-sized Lenape expansion deck, created in collaboration with a circle of local Lenape advisors, to give players an opportunity to delve into the Indigenous perspectives on the land as well. For more information about where to find the game or the outreach events programmed for this fall visit the Lenapehoking~Watershed website, Facebook, or  Instagram for dates, times, and locations.

Aqua Marooned! at Bartram’s Garden

Visit the Garden’s Welcome Center, open every day 9AM-4PM, to grab your FREE Bartram’s Garden Aqua Marooned! deck and start your journey. Swim Pony will also be at the first 2022 Family Outdoor Movie Night at the Garden on Friday, June 24, 2022, with decks and more information about the game.

Aqua Marooned! was conceived by Adrienne Mackey, founder and artistic director of Swim Pony, an experience design company that develops innovative, immersive experiences of play. During the course of its three-year development, the company collaborated with illustrator/graphic designers Meg Lemieur and Bri Barton, co-writer Brad Wrenn, representatives from 19 different AWE Centers, and a Lenni-Lenape Advisory Circle led by Trinity Norwood, Project Advisor for the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation. 

More about Lenapehoking~Watershed Art Project: The L~W Art Project is a wide-ranging, multifaceted art project that wants to introduce Lenapehoking residents to their watershed. A program of the Alliance for Watershed Education of the Delaware River (AWE), this initiative winds its way through the landscapes and waterways of the Delaware River Watershed in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. Aqua Marooned! is one of two innovative and completely unique artist-driven projects activating the AWE environmental education centers as part of Lenapehoking~Watershed. The other is Water Spirit, a series of plant-based sculptures by Sarah Kavage that serve as focal points for events and community gatherings. The name, “Lenapehoking~Watershed, a place for water, art and culture” was chosen after consulting with citizens of our local Lenni Lenape Nations. “Lenapehoking” is a place name that means “the land of the Lenape people.” Foremost, as this is an initiative about the land and the water, the L~W team acknowledges Indigenous cultures’ environmental stewardship as critical. Lenapehoking~Watershed offers multiple opportunities for inspiration, refreshment, and learning. Encouraging others to discover new things, meet new people at outdoor cultural gatherings, and enjoy solitary meditations on art and nature.

Lead support for the Lenapehoking~Watershed is provided by the William Penn Foundation, with additional support from the National Endowment for the Arts, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Barra Foundation, the Delaware Division for the Arts, the Joseph Robert Foundation, and the Velocity Fund. 

About Alliance for Watershed Education: The Alliance for Watershed Education of the Delaware River is a regional initiative of twenty-three partnering environmental education centers that is funded and supported by the William Penn Foundation. Each of these centers is located along the Circuit Trail or a major connecting trail, and on waterways throughout the Delaware River Watershed in Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Through joint programming like the annual River Days events, and shared best practices, the centers aim to increase their collective impact within the watershed and its communities. 

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Visitors with an ACCESS card can join a house or garden tour for just $2 per person, for up to 4 people total. In addition, we are offering $2 tickets to many of our programs for ACCESS card holders. Keep an eye on our upcoming events for more information about how to purchase ACCESS tickets.

We continue to offer discounted $5 program and event tickets to our neighbors in Southwest Philadelphia. For more information about our Southwest neighbor discount or our Art-Reach partnership, reach out to our Arts & Culture Programs Manager, Zach Webber, at zwebber@bartramsgarden.org or 215-729-5281 ext. 112

Our partnership with Art-Reach is just one way in which we strive to create room for all at Bartram’s Garden. You support this work by donating to our Room for All fund, or by becoming a member.

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William Bartram, “A Map of the Coast of East Florida.”– Travels…, Philadelphia: 1791.

In vivid text, Travels recounts Bartram’s southern explorations from 1773 to 1776, and documents his encounters with the natural world and with the native and colonial inhabitants of the English colonies along the Southern Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Bartram’s descriptions of Florida and the South captured readers internationally during his life and the book continues to be read widely in modern times. Bartram’s Travels was an unprecedented mix of literary genres—part travel book, part scientific record and description — a romantic narrative, an ethnography of Southern native peoples, and an exposition by Bartram on natural and theological philosophy.

The publication of Travels in Philadelphia in the 1790s was an expensive undertaking. A large book, running over 522 text pages with an additional introduction, the original edition included illustrations and a map by William Bartram. It took two subscription efforts to get the book to print, in what was a risky publishing effort in post-revolution Philadelphia. The first subscription effort for the book in 1786, by the Quaker printer Enoch Story, Jr. failed, perhaps for financial reasons, but also in part because William Bartram suffered a life-threatening fall and compound fracture at the ankle while gathering bald cypress seeds at Bartram’s Garden in fall 1786. It took over a year for Bartram to recover. A second broader national subscription for Travels in 1790 by the new firm of Joseph James & Benjamin Johnson in Philadelphia succeeding in seeing the book to print in summer 1791.

It has recently been discovered that Bartram’s Travelswas issued in Philadelphia in more than one version. The standard version distributed to most subscribers had frontispiece, map and 7 illustrations. In early 1792 retail copies were also offered for sale with the option of “extra Plates, (eight in number)… either plain or coloured.” These extra plates were larger in size and were folded in thirds to be bound in the book. Currently only 5 sets of these extra illustrations are known.

William Bartram drawing/James Trenchard engraving: “Bignonia Bracteata. Journ. page.” or Georgia bark (Pinckneya bracteata). Engraving by James Trenchard, possibly for 1786 (Story) edition of “Travels.”
APS-B. S. Barton Collection
Hallock & Hoffmann, p. 295

It is not surprising that William Hamilton of The Woodlands seems to have owned at least two copies of the original Philadelphia edition of Bartram’s Travels. “The Woodlands Household Accounts” record payment September 8, 1792: “Bartrams Travels 11 [shillings]   3 [pence]”

Travels as advertised in Dobson and Claypoole’s Daily Advertiser, January 4, 1792. (Image courtesy of Jim Green of the Library Company of Philadelphia

This is the equivalent of the $2.00 price for a bound copy of William Bartram’s Travels, but it isn’t known if Hamilton was a subscriber or if he purchased a retail copy in 1792. [Accounts were frequently paid long after the fact in the 18th century.]

So far no trace of this first Hamilton owned copy of Bartram’s Travels has surfaced. A second, fine copy of Travels, with the standard plates colored, and bound with the 8 extra plates colored was presented by William Bartram to William Hamilton in 1799. This presentation copy from 1799 is now owned by the Sterling Morton Library at the Morton Arboretum, Lisle, IL.

The Hamilton extra-illustrated copy of Travels, contains a rare copy of William Hamilton’s bookplate under the front cover, engraved with the Hamilton family arms and “W. Hamilton.” William Hamilton was certainly a collector of books, as well as plants, art, statuary and more. Recent research by Villanova students turned up a dozen volumes in Philadelphia area special collections libraries with the Hamilton bookplate or signature. But Hamilton likely owned dozens or even hundreds of volumes on botany, gardening and natural history. One book signed and with the W. Hamilton bookplate is now part of a collection of Bartram family books donated to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in the 1890s by a Bartram descendant. That book. Thomas Martyn, The language of botany…, London: 1796 is a standard dictionary of botanic terms in English. It was probably loaned to William Bartram or another Bartram family member and never returned to Hamilton.

William Hamilton’s bookplate, engraved with the Hamilton family arms and “W. Hamilton,” graces the inside cover of the copy of Travels held at Morton Arboretum. (Image courtesy of the Sterling Morton Library)

The title page is signed by Hamilton on the upper right; “W. Hamilton’s Book give to him by the Author, June 9th, 1799.” No other documentation about this gift from William Bartram to William Hamilton survives. It may be Hamilton had lost or loaned his original copy of Travels, or he may have wanted an additional copy with the rare extra engraved plates?

It is clear that William Hamilton closely read this copy of Travels, as there are small annotations on several pages – including the addition of the scientific names “Gordonia Franklini” and “Pinckneya” on page 16, where the description of Franklinia was printed facing the two folded extra-illustrations of “Franklinia alatamaha” and “Bignonia bracteata” [modern Pinckneya bracteata, or fevertree].

“W. Hamilton’s Book given to him by the Author June 9th, 1799” is inscribed on the cover page. (Image courtesy of the Sterling Morton Library)

Other notes by Hamilton in his extra-illustrated copy of Travels also comment or annotate some of the rarest plants that William Bartram encountered in his trip. And of course there is evidence that Hamilton was growing some of William Bartram’s southern plant discoveries in the garden at The Woodlands. One of the seed packets recently recovered from the attic of The Woodlands was labeled “Hydrangea quercifolia, Bartram’s Travels” and oakleaf hydrangea was another new plant described and illustrated by Bartram in the book.

Hamilton’s note of the scientific name “Gordonia Franklini” for Franklinia references part of a rare illustrated collection of new plants from Paris, published by the botanist Charles Louis L’Héritier de Brutelle in 1791. And the genus name Pinckney was not published as a scientific name until 1803 by the French botanist André Michaux. Hamilton may have learned of both these then current scientific names from Michaux’s Flora. Note the Franklinia plate folded to the right (as shown in the image above). (Image courtesy of the Sterling Morton Library)

A note by Hamilton reads, ““This is a Species of a Shrub supposed by Michaux to be Befaria before described in this work page —.” Interestingly, this plant has gone through three spellings, “Befaria”, “Besaria”, and “Bejaria”. It is now officially called Bejaria racemosa, flyweed, a flowering shrub from Florida discovered by William Bartram. Flyweed as “Befaria hirsuta” was listed for sale as a greenhouse plant in Bartram Catalogues from 1807 onward. (Image courtesy of the Sterling Morton Library)

Hamilton’s inscriptions are telling; he only made notations in the botanic sections of Travels, indicating little interest  in sections dealing with birds and wildlife, or in the parts dealing with Native peoples — the Creek, Seminole, and Cherokee.

“Errata” inserted at rear of William Bartram’s Travels… Phila: 1791, extra illustrated copy given to William Hamilton of The Woodlands, June 9th, 1799.
The Morton Arboretum, Lisle, IL. Photocopy and notes from Dr. Michael T> Stieber, Administravie and Reference Librarian

A group of  scholars, including Nancy Hoffmann, Bill Cahill, Alina Josan and Joel Fry, are currently working to research and locate copies of the 1791 edition of William Bartram’s Travels, collating a census of copies, and looking for owner’s names, annotations, binding, and general history. The researchers have located over 125 copies, mainly in special collections libraries in the US, and have visited 56 or more copies. Many or most of the copies seem to be subscription copies, and a third or more have a similar original binding. Many of the owners who signed copies were substantial citizens in the early U.S, and local lending libraries around Philadelphia also held a number of copies. Only four are now know bound with the extra plates seen in William Hamilton’s copy at the Morton Arboretum. As of yet, the researchers don’t have a firm knowledge of how many copies of the 1791 Philadelphia edition were printed, but they estimate that it might be on the order of 400 or 500 total.

The lasting fame of Travels is probably due to the widespread European reprints of the book, which began to appear in 1792, a year after the Philadelphia printing. There were English editions of Travels in London in 1792 and 1794, Dublin: 1793; translations into German with editions in Berlin and Vienna: 1793; a Dutch translated edition in Haarlem, 1794-1797; and French translated editions from Paris: 1799 and 1801. These European editions were all based on the 1791 subscription version and copied the standard illustrations, but never included the 8 extra plates.

Stay tuned as we highlight more of the fascinating botanical connections between these two sites!

Previous Posts:
Introducing the Two Williams
Found in the Floorboards: 200 Year Old Seed Packets

Upcoming Posts:
Think Local Swap Global: 18th Century Approaches to Plant Collecting
From Seed Shack to Plant Palace: Evolutions in Greenhouse Technologies
The 19th Century Commercial Nursery

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