Awkardly Anonymous

It is that season – when family takes center-stage and leaves the ‘singles’ by the way side. Maybe, like me, your family has moved away or no longer has great depth. I had the blessing of living near my mom and sisters when our family was young and never had to think about where to go on the holidays.

One Christmas, we were hundreds of miles away, but after the gifts were opened and the kids were looking at me like “what’s next”, we loaded the family up in the van and drove to my mom’s house. She put a “leaf” in the table and welcomed us with open arms.

But that season has come and gone. Now I can get a glimpse of what others have faced – when there literally is no ‘home’ that is missing you. And that can feel ‘awkwardly anonymous.’

I went to an interesting lecture last week. The researcher, Dr. Fenella Heckscher, spoke of a young woman who has remained anonymous for almost 300 years. Jane Colden and her Scottish family moved from New Amsterdam to a farm up the Hudson River in 1727. With their fifth child in tow, Dr. Cadwallader Colden and his wife were land-granted 3,000 acres to serve as Surveyor General for the young American colony. He and his growing family laid out a large farm in the woods and streams of today’s Town of Newburgh just a few miles from where we now live.

As a young woman, Jane began exploring the dense woods in search of plants that would help her physician-father. She interacted with the native Americans in the surrounding area. She must have loved the experience so much, because she went on to catalogue more than 300 species in the new world. Though born is 1726 and quite isolated in colonial New York, she did have the advantage of having access to her father’s library which included the botany work of Carl Linnaeus – a contemporary Swedish biologist and physician who was formalizing binomial nomenclature – the modern system of naming organisms.

Plants, in Jane’s time, were just starting to be named, organized and discovered for their useful and medicinal properties. Jane began foraging for her father’s work and for edibles, but soon found her own purpose in cataloguing the various wild flowers, plants and trees nearby. Paying attention to the details. Studying the changes that took place in the seasons. I imagine she found some company in the thick forests – somehow inviting her to discover their secrets.

Many of Jane’s findings were superseded by the male botanist of the day. One example above is Hypericum virginicum  or what is more commonly known as marsh St. John’s-wort. Alexander Garden first observed this plant in 1754, but following correspondence with Jane realized that she had previously collected and recorded the same species one year before. Then some 80 years later another botanist,  Rafinesque, proposed placing it a new genus, Triadenum, acknowledging, perhaps unknowingly, Jane Colden's original belief that Hypericum virginicum was sufficiently unique to warrant its own genus.

That’s the thing. When does anything go from anonymous to discovered?

By definition anonymous is nameless, incognito, not identified; or of unknown name. It’s the opposite of being an “influencer” in our day and age. Just because the notes that Jane took and put into a “Botany Manuscript” stayed out of circulation all these years, here I was learning her story on a cold November night in a room full of fellow nature lovers.

The work of this backwoods teenager developed into America’s best early book of botany, a book that can still be studied as a classic centuries later. Apparently, some local Newburgh residents found a copy of it in the 1960’s and had it published. One lady in the crowd circulated her old copy, which was one of the sparks for Dr. Heckscher’s research that she will release next year entitled: Jane Colden’s “Botanic Manuscript”: The Legacy of America’s First Woman Botanist.

Which should give us all hope in the awkward interim, when who we are and what we love goes unnoticed. I’ve driven by the Historical Marker for Jane many a time. Little did I know she was a kindred spirit – lover of nature and writer. That’s the thing. We walk by, brush by, take little time to notice the opportunities around us. I encourage you this holiday season to look beyond the decorated doorways and shelves to see what others pass by. You may discover you have more in common than you imagined.

“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,” William Shakespeare