Bartram, John

John Bartram, (born March 23, 1699, near Darby, Pa. [U.S.]—died Sept. 22, 1777, Kingsessing, Pa., U.S.), naturalist and explorer considered the “father of American botany.”

Largely self-educated, Bartram was a friend of Benjamin Franklin and an original member of the American Philosophical Society. He was botanist for the American colonies to King George III.

Bartram was the first North American experimenter to hybridize flowering plants, and he established near Philadelphia a botanical garden that became internationally famous. He collected and exported seeds and plants that were in great demand abroad and thus established friendships with European botanists, among them Carolus Linnaeus, who esteemed him as a great “natural botanist.”

Bartram made scientific forays into the Alleghenies, Carolinas, and other areas of North America, and in 1743 he was commissioned by the British crown to visit the Indian tribes of the League of Six Nations and to explore the wilderness north to Lake Ontario in Canada. In 1765–66 he explored extensively in Florida with his son William, also a naturalist, whose Travels (1791) greatly influenced English Romanticism.