Qualla: United States Botanic Garden

United States Botanic Garden: Introduction

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kplans, CC BY 4.0. On June 9, 1842, the U.S. Navy ship Vincennes dropped anchor in New York harbor after a four-year voyage that had taken her around Cape Horn, across the South Pacific, along the coast of Antarctica, up the Columbia River, across to Japan, and home around the Cape of Good Hope. Charles Wilkes had set out in 1838 with five other ships and 346 men on what Congress had funded as the United States Exploring Expedition. The Vincennes was one of two ships that completed the circumnavigation. Wilkes had lost 28 men to disease, drowning, and one Fijian attack. In the holds of his ships were the dried plant specimens that became the National Herbarium and the living plants - kept alive on long ocean voyages in newly invented Wardian cases, a sealed glass terrarium - that needed somewhere to live in Washington. Congress reopened the dormant Botanic Garden to receive them. Two of those plants, or their direct descendants, are still alive.

Image: Kplans | CC BY 4.0

United States Botanic Garden: The Wilkes Plants

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Remember, Public domain. Four plants in the current collection have direct ties to the 1842 expedition. The Vessel Fern (Angiopteris evecta), growing in the Jungle room, is believed to be a direct descendant - genetically identical, propagated from spores or rhizomes across nearly two centuries - of the ...

Image: Remember | Public domain

United States Botanic Garden: Columbian Institute Origins

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ron Dicker, CC BY-SA 4.0. The idea of a national botanic garden came not from Congress but from the Columbian Institute for the Promotion of Arts and Sciences - a learned society that met in Washington beginning in 1816 with John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, and other prominent men as members...

Image: Ron Dicker | CC BY-SA 4.0

United States Botanic Garden: The Photius Fisk Donations

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MaxHerz, CC BY-SA 4.0. Charles Wilkes was not the only U.S. naval officer collecting plants for the Botanic Garden in the nineteenth century. Photius Fisk, a Greek-born abolitionist who had emigrated to Boston and become a U.S. Navy chaplain, spent the 1850s collecting seeds and rare plants for the gar...

Image: MaxHerz | CC BY-SA 4.0

United States Botanic Garden: The Lord and Burnham Conservatory

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kristinahuntsman, CC BY-SA 4.0. The current Botanic Garden building, opened in 1933 just southwest of the Capitol, is a Lord and Burnham greenhouse - the New York firm that built most of the major American botanical conservatories in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The structure is divided in...

Image: Kristinahuntsman | CC BY-SA 4.0

United States Botanic Garden: Bartholdi and the National Garden

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Photo: Andreas Praefcke, CC BY 3.0. Across Independence Avenue south of the Conservatory lies Bartholdi Park, named for the Bartholdi Fountain at its center. Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, the French sculptor who would later design the Statue of Liberty, made the fountain for the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadel...

Image: Photo: Andreas Praefcke | CC BY 3.0