Bartram's Garden
Pennsylvania
On the west bank of the Schuylkill River in southwest Philadelphia sits the oldest surviving botanical garden in the United States. John Bartram, a self-taught Quaker farmer with no formal education, purchased a one hundred two acre farm here in seventeen twenty-eight and spent the rest of his life turning it into Colonial America's most complete collection of North American plants. He corresponded with Linnaeus, co-founded the American Philosophical Society with Benjamin Franklin, and in seventeen sixty-five King George the Third appointed him Royal Botanist for North America.
His son William carried the work forward, and after John died the family published the new nation's first catalog of American plants, in seventeen eighty-three. In eighteen ninety-one the garden became part of Philadelphia's public park system. The stone farmhouse John Bartram built still stands on the grounds.
