Brethren of Spade & Pruning Knife: The Naturalists & the Carolinas

This presentation tells a story of international trade, natural history, and science from the days of exploration & colonization. This was a time of transfer, the movement of people, animals and plants; it is the Age of the Natural Historians who looked around the world and tried to understand what they saw. Carolina has an amazing part of this story to impart – connections to the Royal Society of England with John Lawson, Mark Catesby who documented and illustrated the birds and animals of the Carolinas one hundred years before Audubon, Linnaeus in Sweden, women gardeners, and Bartram of Philadelphia. Learn why the gardenia is named after a Charleston immigrant who was especially interested in collecting fish skins. This presentation is about the times and the people that connected Charleston history to scientific inquiry and experimentation from the late 1600s into the eighteenth century.