names that became, in effect, templates for the description and experience of American plants that were, as we understand them now, most often new species.
For both their present-day and contemporary readers, these references function by their obviousness. Named and listed as part of a floral catalogue of their new environments, these generic references can provide a crucial insight into both how French authors perceived North American plants and how they communicated their findings within the French Atlantic world and throughout Europe. This is in large part due to the overwhelming predominance of what scholars of folk taxonomies call a folk generic or generic specieme.108 This, as ethnobotanist Brent Berlin writes, is the “category readily recognizable at first glance, as a single gestalt or configuration,” and one that requires neither the use of specialized tools (i.e., microscope) nor considerable effort at differentiation.109 Authors such as Champlain would have come with a set of generic floral templates based on their experience of the environments they had left. Having come from regions where there may have been just one example of a particular genus, all future species encountered were understood to be subtypes of this model. When Champlain commented on the birch he found in Wendake, for example, he identified the novel Fagus grandifolia with the Fagus sylvatica he would have known in France.110 Differences in the shape of leaves and ecologies were effaced or minimized, and a piece of a new environment was cognitively domesticated.
With the use of these familiar names, the morphological details of a plant were most often simply implied. When he turned his attention to plants that he felt required more detail, Louis Nicolas situated them within particular cultural contexts and provided additional linguistic, medical, or economic information. When he described barley, for instance, he wrote that it was originally introduced from France and was used to make beer.111 To describe a species of seaweed, he wrote only that small crustaceans survived the force of waves by growing filaments that kept them bound to the marine plant.112 Thus even where a European botanical type was situated within a novel ecological or cultural context, its physical continuity with European plants was implied by relying on and reinforcing the salience of universally applicable types arrayed in lists compiled under a recognizable and familiar logic.
French familiarity was increased because of nearly a century of contact with American flora that had arrived as part of a broader Columbian Exchange.113 American plants such as corn, pumpkins, sunflowers, and beans—widely sown in indigenous landscapes and a regular feature of travel accounts and natural history—were, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, relatively well-known in France. A recent analysis of the Grandes heures of Anne of Brittany, produced between 1503 and 1508, revealed the introduction, already by this early date, of a North American squash into cultivated landscapes in the Loire Valley. Botanical analysis of the “Quegourdes de Turquie” illustrated in the text suggests that it was an example of Cucurbita pepo, subspecies texana that was likely originally collected from the northern coasts of the Gulf of Mexico.114 This is a variant of the same species that was represented in frescoes at the Villa Farnesina in Rome between 1515 and 1518, where the South American species C. maxima also appeared.115 The eighteenth-century botanist Antoine de Jussieu also identified an American bean now known as Phaseolus vulgaris in the Grandes Heures.116 How these plants arrived in the Loire Valley by 1508 and how they came to grow in the garden of Anne of Brittany, then queen of France, remains an open question, although the queen’s strong personal ties to the papacy and Spanish crown may have inserted her into networks of botanical circulation that quickly diffused newly discovered American plants throughout Europe in the decades after first contact.117
There is little doubt that the squash in Anne’s gardens were valued as a curiosity, but American flora became more economically significant and more widely grown as the century progressed. Charles Estienne, the author of the influential sixteenth-century L’Agriculture et maison rustique, wrote that “Turkish wheat [blé de Turquie], so called, or rather Indian wheat [blé d’Inde], … came originally from the west indies, then from Turkey and from there into France, not that it was cultivated for pleasure, or for the admiration of foreign things, of which the French give great weight.”118 Providing insights into the cultivation of the crop, he also offered advice on assimilating it into French lives. “It has a similar temperament to our wheat,” he wrote, “always hotter, recognizable by the softness of the bread that is made with it.”119 Corn spread throughout Europe quickly in the wake of Spanish explorations of the Caribbean and American mainland, although recent research into the genetics of European corn populations suggests that the spread of the crop into northern Europe awaited a second introduction from North America.120 The diffusion of corn within France was slower than in contemporary Spain or Italy, but by the turn of the seventeenth century the crop was beginning to gain traction in rural regions such as Bresse.121 Estienne likewise discussed the domestic cultivation of the pumpkins that Anne of Brittany had likely grown as a curiosity.122 By the early seventeenth century, new editions of the Maison rustique also introduced tobacco as a valuable crop for landowners in France.123 Champlain, Lescarbot, Biard, and Sagard had each left a France that was already home to many of the most widely cultivated American plants that they would find in New France.
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The relatedness of French and northeastern North American environments was therefore frequently as obvious to seventeenth-century authors as it is to contemporary natural scientists. Accounting for this uncanny relatedness—a simultaneous recognition of difference and affinity—was the intellectual challenge for explorers, settlers, and missionaries who traveled and settled in the Saint Lawrence Valley and Acadia. It was neither possible nor preferable to completely ignore the differences that existed between European and American plants or the diversity that existed within North American plant populations. Adding additional information on cultural and religious significance or ecological and morphological distinctions, colonial authors modified generic botanical types to create what ethnobotanists refer to as folk specifics or folk varietals. This is obvious, for instance, when authors described white pine or red cedar. Assuming a shared body of characteristics (pine-ness or cedarness, in this case), authors could incorporate new flora with the greatest possible economy of description and communicate more effectively with their French audiences. The Jesuit Louis Nicolas wrote that there were three façons (later using the word “species” as well). The smallest type was not even given a name, and as for the difference between the red and white species, he wrote that they “differ only in the color of their bark.”124 While there were moments where these comparisons seem infelicitous, such as when Sagard described the Tupinambour (Sunchoke or Jerusalem Artichoke) as the “apple of Canada,” they more often pointed to an acknowledgment of real botanical continuities that we now use evolutionary science to explain.125
Contact with indigenous cultures could provide colonists and explorers with new names for American plants and knowledge about their possible uses. Lescarbot related, for example, the vain search for the plant Annedda that had—a century earlier—cured Jacques Cartier’s men of scurvy as an instance where this dependence meant death. “As to the tree Annedda to which Cartier has made mention,” he wrote, “the Sauvages of these lands do not know it at all.”126 Cartier had described the miraculous plant only as “large and as tall as any I ever saw” but lavished attention on its powers and, it seems, brought specimens of the tree that were soon growing in the gardens at Fontainebleau. It “produced such a result,” he wrote, “that had all the doctors of Louvain and Montpellier been there, with all the drugs of Alexandria, they could not have done so much in a year as did this tree in eight days.”127 The most obvious lesson from the incident for seventeenth-century colonists was to turn to indigenous peoples and ask for the curing plant. Champlain, when he discovered a Native near Tadoussac with the name “Aneda,” seemed sure that “by this name was the one of his race who had found the herb Aneda known,” even if “the sauvages do not know this herb at all.”128 Many of these truly novel plants, however, were presented
