Post-humous Honors, Part 1

Post-humous Honors

Jenny received numerous citations by botanists in the decades following her early death. These citations appeared fairly frequently in the professional science literature, helped along by the leader in the field of plant Taxonomy–Carl von Linne, followed by the efforts of at least three other botanists and an equal number of popular press editors in the science journal industry between 1780 and 1840.

The most influential of these writers was perhaps her immediate associate in the field Alexander Garden. In 1770, he wrote, presented and had published an article about her attempts to name a specific flwoer after him, which she wanted to call Gardenia. This plant very much resembled the Hypericum, but due to some slight differences in flower structure noted by Jenny, she felt it worthy of its own genus name. The discussions about this naming of the plant took place mostly from 1754 on, for the next several years, and involved a number of other botanists including Linne, Collinson and Bartram. In the end, this attempt to provide a new genus name was unsuccessful, but this did not stop Dr. Garden from presenting his own rendering of this experience, but in traditional Latin which he wrote, and in regular English which Jenny had written earlier. This article was subsequently published in the Edinburgh Journal of Arts and Sciences in 1770 (reviewed on another page).

Jenny’s father, Cadwallader had passed away just a few years earlier, leaving Dr. Garden as perhaps the only individual capable of making Jenny’s name and accomplishment a necessity for all future botanists to learn about.

Interestingly, the bulk of the professional citations and writings about Jenny were published in the traditional Botany journals in German and Swedish languages. Ironically minimal coverage of Jenny’s accomplishments and her remaining collection of dried, preserved, mounted and labeled plant specimens seem to gather little attention from the American botany world. It was as if there was a little hesitancy towards acknowledging her accomplishments in the appropriate fashion, or perhaps this was simply due to the rapid advances being made in American botany by American botanists, or perhaps it was simply due to the usual American attitudee towards fem,ale scientists during this period. Whatever the reason, it was the European press that kept Jenny’s accomplishments in center stage where they belonged. None of her specimens were noted in the Linnean collection during a recent review of it. It seems that all of her speciments made their way ultimately to Joseph Banks, a famous Botanist in his own right, who by the end of the eighteenth century had produced one of the greatest collections of plant books the world had known and who had the privileges of saving many special collections from otherwise being ignored by the profession. In the end, Bank’s collection made its way to a final depository setting in England, where it remains to this day.

The following announcements, notes or professional news items published about Jenny Colden and her accomplishments as a female botanist were found in the popular press and scientific journals and primary reference sources. The first came from a separately published book by Carl von Linne on various special topics not typically reviewed in Plantae Generum . . . and the like. The remaining items include a references to Garden’s rendering of Jenny’s work post-humously, followed by numerous recounts and recitations of Jenny’s collection and its history of travel from one library to the next over the next two decades. (These moves are covered in the published 1895 biographical article about Jenny by Britton, provided on a separate page.) The final rendering is provided in two forms–the original pdf and a slightly modified pdf for purposes of cleaning up the text and hopefully improving its readability.

Endnote: Other examples will be added once I’ve completed their reviews.