David Douglas, a Naturalist at Work: An Illustrated Exploration Across Two Centuries in the Pacific Northwest by Jack Nisbet

Author:Jack Nisbet [Nisbet, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-57061-830-7
Publisher: Sasquatch Books
Published: 2012-11-06T00:00:00+00:00

Mt. Washington, Willamette Country

“Country undulating; soil rich, light, with beautiful solitary oaks and pines interspersed through it.”

—David Douglas (illustration credit 7.2)

Back in London in 1828, Douglas revisited a monograph he had written on North American oaks based on the information he had acquired during his trip to the eastern seaboard. This manuscript, never published during Douglas’s lifetime, illuminates both his developing collection methods and his aims as a budding scientist.

Douglas was a voracious reader, and he certainly hoped to someday join the ranks of respected collecting botanists who had preceded him. For this initial effort, he used the published works of Frederick Pursh and André Michaux as his guides. The French Michaux had been almost forty years old when he arrived in New York in 1785 and caught Thomas Jefferson’s eye as a man who could help broaden a fledgling nation’s scientific horizons. Michaux established a garden in the wilds of New Jersey to hold his collections, then traveled to Philadelphia to meet famed Southeastern collector William Bartram. In 1792 he met with fur traders in lower Canada and, guided by a mixed-blood interpreter, attempted a canoe expedition that stalled halfway to James Bay. Although Michaux’s and Jefferson’s master plan for an expedition to the Pacific in the early 1790s was squelched by political concerns, he carried out more than a decade of work in the New World, and produced several books, including, in 1801, The Oaks of North America.

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