Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

LANDRUM—Conserving Carolina and the Landrum Library are partnering to host a free lecture entitled “André Michaux and His Contribution to Botany in the Southeast,” presented by author Charles Williams. 

The program will be held on Thursday, June 6, at 6 p.m. at the Landrum Library, located at 111 East Asbury Drive. 

Known to today’s biologists primarily as the “Michx.” at the end of more than 700 plant names and to historians for his part in the Genet Affair, André Michaux was an intrepid French naturalist. Under the directive of King Louis XVI, he was commissioned to gather and grow American plants and ship them back to his homeland in order to improve French forestry, agriculture, and horticulture. He made major botanical discoveries that he published in his two landmark books, Histoire des Chênes de l’Amérique (1801), a compendium of all oak species recognized from eastern North America, and Flora Boreali-Americana (1803), the first account of all plants known in eastern North America.

To carry out his mission for the French government, Michaux traveled from the Bahamas to Hudson’s Bay and west to the Mississippi River on a series of journeys that are indicated on a finely rendered, color-coded map in this volume. His writings detail the many hardships and dangers that Michaux endured on the North American frontier and on his return home. But it also conveys the soaring joys of exploration in a new world where Nature still reigned supreme, a paradise of plants mostly unknown to science.

This lecture is part of Conserving Carolina’s monthly Speaker Series at the Landrum Library, and it is made possible thanks to the Landrum Library. The next program at the Landrum Library will be held on Tuesday, July 16, when Dan Whitten, president of the SC Native Plant Society, will present on “Flora of Glassy Mountain Heritage Preserve.” 

For more information, contact Pam Torlina at pam@conservingcarolina.org or contact the Landrum Library at (864) 457-2218.