authorities such as Virgil, mapped neatly onto a larger seventeenth-century debate about the relationship between France and its Roman past. Sixteenth-century French humanists had claimed the Gauls as their colonized ancestors to chart a new intellectual course distinct from an inherited Roman past.40 French theorizations of empire were heavily inspired by a Roman model (as all European nations were, to some extent).41 As French intellectuals debated their cultural debt to Rome, an agricultural discourse enabled them to refigure differences between Roman and French culture (otherwise often understood to be deficiencies in the French) into an evolutionary model that figured cultivation as a principal civilizing act.42 Even if colonialism could occupy an ambiguous place within the thought of Serres and his adherents—the Duc de Sully, for example, saw colonialism as a drain on French population and an overextension that defeated the effective management of French territories—in stepping into the role of their former Roman colonizers, colonial promoters in France argued that their nation would itself be bettered.43 Colonialism would work alongside the cultivation of French arts and sciences to produce a nation that surpassed its classical counterparts.44
* * *
Lescarbot’s Histoire described a particularly momentous presentation of American flora to the French court that had taken place in 1607. This had been a crucial moment only three years after the first colony in Acadia had been founded and only two years after Port Royal had been established in 1605. The colonists—Lescarbot among them—had just recently learned that their monopoly on the fur trade that had been granted to their benefactor and leader, the Sieur de Monts, had been revoked in the face of opposition from Atlantic merchants in France.45 In August of that year, the colonists at Port Royal had been forced to return to a king and a court that seemed uncertain about how or even whether to support colonization in North America. It was Jean de Poutrincourt, a close friend of de Monts and lieutenant governor of his colony in Acadia, who “presented to the King the fruits of the land from which they came” when they arrived in Paris. Alongside geese and other fauna from North America, it was “the grain, wheat, rye, barley, & oats, as the most precious things that one could bring back from any country,” that he delivered to king and court.46
In the context of disputes over the colony’s direction, experiences of cultivation were forwarded as a symbol of the promise of the colony and proof of the moral authority of its founders and leaders. There was nothing “curious” about the wheat, rye, barley, and oats that Poutrincourt brought back from Acadia.47 These were not rare plants valuable to collectors, nor were they of any medicinal benefit beyond the calories that they could provide. These were among the humblest plants that could be brought back from New France, but in this Lescarbot suggested that Poutrincourt had echoed the Romans, who had likewise translated such a harvest into symbols of triumph in their own newly claimed regions, dating back to the foundations of Rome itself.48 He was, Lescarbot would reflect, akin to the “good father Noah, who after having made the most necessary agriculture in the sowing of wheat, put himself to planting the vine.”49
Colonization increased French access to American naturalia, but increased access did not necessarily translate into greater knowledge about North America. French naturalists such as the Provence-based Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc were able to personally observe and experience North American animals such as the caribou, the hummingbird, and a horseshoe crab that had been brought back by early Acadian settlers such as de Monts.50 These North American animals joined collections that also included cultural artifacts such as canoes, bows and arrows, and the aboriginal weapon known to the French as the casse-tête.51 They were valued, like other objects with which they were stored and compared, less for their contribution to furthering knowledge about newly claimed or discovered regions of the world than for their novelty and rarity.52 The arrival and dissemination of these American plants were therefore part of a much larger culture of curiosity that animated a diverse array of intellectual and commercial activity in the seventeenth century and that was at least equally concerned with geographical breadth as it was precision.53
Considerable geographical uncertainty limited the impact of flora from northeastern North America. Within scientific genres, the significance of locality remained a debated subject.54 Terms used to designate regions of North America such as Canada remained unmoored to specific locations.55 Early gardens such as Peiresc’s blended flora from the world over. In a 1630 letter, for example, Peiresc described his garden in the southeast of France as home to “several curious pieces come from the Indies and from Canada and from elsewhere.” Alongside “an orchard of fruit trees where I have more than sixty sort of excellent European apples,” and hyacinths, he noted that his “vine of Canada” had “covered entire houses in three or four years.”56 The systematic study of these plants was further limited by their irregular arrival and frequently confused provenance. Peiresc and other collectors could touch, taste, smell, and observe American squash, grapes, and strawberries, but we have little record of where these originated from, nor do we have much information about the identities behind the many hands that would have been needed to transplant them in Peiresc’s southern garden.57 In hindsight it is possible to see the stirrings of a botanical science with a particular attention to morphological and geographical specificity, but that was not the goal of collectors such as Peiresc.
In Paris, it was the efforts of Guy de la Brosse, Jean Robin, and Robin’s son Vespasien in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that established a sizable presence of American plants in the city’s gardens. Both Robins and de la Brosse presided over gardens associated with royal authority and the city’s medical establishments, Jean and Vespasien Robin as gardeners for Henri IV and the city’s medical faculty and de la Brosse as physician to Louis XIII and first director of the Jardin du Roi after it was founded in 1635.58 They directed increasingly sophisticated and well-funded gardens that helped the crown establish cultural authority through the skilled display of exotic plants.59 Jean Robin, a surgeon by training, had been hired to create a garden for the faculty of medicine in Paris in 1597.60 His son Vespasien collected plants throughout Europe and, where they had already been transplanted in European gardens, from the Americas and Asia.61 Vespasien was later hired as a botanical demonstrator at the Jardin du Roi founded by de la Brosse.62 In a 1641 catalogue of the plants that grew in his garden, de La Brosse credited Vespasien with introducing many of the foreign plants, as well as with maintaining the networks through which new seeds and specimens arrived.63
Vespasien and his father were only two among the many Paris-based gardeners who introduced foreign flora into the French capital in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.64 Published catalogues of their gardens allow us to trace the growth in the presence of American plants numerically, even if the source of many of these specimens remains unknowable. In 1601, at least three of the almost 1,300 plants that Robin listed in his Catalogus stirpium tam indigenarum quam exoticarum quae Lutetiae coluntur were identifiably American: an arbor vitae that was first brought back by Jacques Cartier, a Christophoriana that Robin also supplied to the English herbalist John Gerard, and the Aconitum racemosum sive Christophoriana that soon became better known simply as snakeroot.65 If only a few were positively North American, many were rare and came to Jean through extensive networks that he cultivated with other collectors and that connected him with plants that were arriving from French, Spanish, Dutch, and English colonies in the Americas.66 Within the first decades of the seventeenth century, he built a sizable collection that would later form the basis of the Jardin du Roi.67
Yet it would be a mistake to assume that the American origins of these plants were prized or that their cultivation supported conversations about colonialism in the places from which they had come. Jean Robin’s association with Robinia pseudoacacia, also known as the Black Locust, for example, reveals the relative unimportance of origin to these collections. Jean is frequently acknowledged as having introduced the plant into Paris—and more specifically into the Left Bank garden of the Paris medical faculty near Notre Dame Cathedral—in 1601, where
