In the lower part of the William Paca Garden, on the right side, are three examples of a very rare small tree. It is the Franklinia alatamaha, one of three genera of the tea family native to North America (the others are Gordonia and Stewartia). Two close relatives, the commercial tea plant (Thea sinensis) and the camellia (Camellia japonica) are native to Asia. Unlike most of the tea family, it is not evergreen. The Franklinia has large white, fragrant, late Summer blossoms and showy red-orange Fall foliage. It is beloved by gardeners everywhere it can be grown, both for its beauty and for its fascinating history.
John Bartram (1699-1777), a third generation Philadelphia Quaker, started his garden in 1728 on 102 acres on the banks of the Schuylkill River. He began collecting native plants, and soon Bartram’s nursery was selling them to the British aristocracy, for whom exotic trees and shrubs for their estates were status symbols. In 1765, he was appointed Royal Botanist for North America by King George III, with the mandate to discover new plants for the royal gardens. So much did King George value the project that he awarded Bartram 50 pounds a year for life. That same year, Bartram and his son William found a stand of small trees along the Alatamaha River in southeast Georgia. The stand was small, two or three acres, and neither seeds nor flowers were present. Although they looked, the Bartrams never found the trees growing anywhere else.
In 1777, William went back and collected seeds. He offered Franklinia for sale in Bartram’s Garden Catalogue of 1783, the first nursery catalogue published in the United States. It was listed as “Alatamaha”, since it wasn’t until a few years later that William decided to name the genus after Benjamin Franklin. George Washington ordered some Franklinia for Mount Vernon because he had admired them when he visited Bartram’s Garden in 1787 during the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. The European craze for North American plants was greater than ever, because the American Revolution had caused an eight year embargo on their importation. And the Franklinia was greatly desired because of its camellia-like flowers. As much as they wanted the tree, however, the Brits could not stomach a focal point of their gardens being named after Benjamin Franklin, so they called it Gordonia pubescens. Not only did William Bartram sell as many Franklinias as he could supply, but British nurserymen sent scouts to Georgia to find the trees directly. For the next 20 years they found them. In 1803 a collector located several and dug them up, but they were the last ever seen in their natural habitat.
The prevailing wisdom among botanists today is that the tree disappeared in the wild for several reasons: so many collectors shipped the Georgia ones to London nurseries; the forests where they grew were cut down to make way for the spread of settlement and the planting of cotton; and Franklinia is susceptible to a disease of cotton, carried by soil-borne pathogens.
Franklinia grows in horticultural zones 6-8. It does better farther north than coastal Georgia, where the climate is less hot. In 2020, the Altamaha River* is in Zone 9. Protected from winds, it grows as far north as Boston. It is an understory tree, but blooms better in some sun. The genetic base is very narrow, since all existing trees are descendants of those in Bartram’s Garden.
Although it was known in the Annapolis area in the 1780’s, which is a few years after William Paca sold his house, it was one of the most popular garden trees of the early years of the Republic and as such deserves a place in our late 18th century garden.
(*The Alatamaha River is now named the Altamaha River, probably because no one ever pronounced the second “a”)
Dolores Dyson Engle
William Paca House and Garden Docent
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