L'Esprit Créateur

Botaniste is the delightful fruit of a collaboration between Marc Jeanson, agronomist, botanist, and former director of the French National Herbarium, and Charlotte Fauve, landscape architect, journalist, and writer. It is an autobiographical narrative to the extent that Jeanson remembers the vegetal encounters that transported him from the muddy ponds of Reims to the palm trees of Senegal; from the Jardin des Plantes in Paris to the Botanical Gardens of New York and then on to the riverbanks of Guangzhou. This story is enriched with poetic meditations, historical anecdotes, and tales of the passions and adventures of French naturalists who explored the vegetal world from the seventeenth century to the present. Being a botanist, Jeanson suggests, [End Page 176] means more than just following one's plants: it entails being "hanté par les fantômes," as each voyage calls to mind the experiences of one's predecessors (29). His personal narrative is therefore interwoven with the stories of Tournefort, Linnaeus, Adanson, Poivre, Commerson, Lamarck, and Michaux father and son. In the process, the book traces a history of European botanical classification methods from early modern times to today's DNA-informed APG 3 system. The effects of deforestation and climate change figure equally prominently in this multi-layered narrative, for the historical archives of the Herbarium testify to a biodiversity that is currently disappearing from the planet.

Even so, Botaniste conjures up fantastic visions of plants' quintessential vitality. Jeanson speculates that, if waters should rise, humidified seeds could escape from the Herbarium and take over the city of Paris, ruining humanity's preciously ordered collections and producing a most extravagant globalized wilderness: "l'air de rien, les plantes complotent au bas des trottoirs" (177). Yet the book is not really interested in engaging with new research on plant physiology, behavior, intelligence or communication. It focuses instead on the human memories, experiences, and sensorial treasures hidden within the Herbarium's cases and folders. Jeanson has fond memories of venerable retired colleagues and of the old Parisian building, an "espace-temps fabuleux," a "tour de Babel de papier et de plantes," whose allure was enhanced by the idiosyncratic nature of its organizational systems (62, 86). The book also reads as an elegy to the physical pleasures of working in those spaces: it recalls the nutmeg perfumes that used to waft around the old building before its renovation, "à la perfection quasi clinique," in 2009–2013 (164). Following fellow botanist Patrick Blanc, Jeanson explains his work as an attempt to record and preserve the "profusion de formes et de teintes, de bruits et d'exhalaisons" that characterize a plant before it is dried (33).

In comical, dramatic, and sometimes tragic terms, Botaniste highlights the obstacles that complicate(d) the collecting of specimens for both men and (more rarely) women, ultimately offering a tribute to those who died in the field. It also acknowledges the value of those indigenous sources whose names were effaced in European colonial narratives, but whose existence is documented "par caisses entières" in the Paris Herbarium (39). Botaniste thus acknowledges important gaps in our historical narratives even though it does little to redress the issue. On a somewhat similar note, academic readers might have appreciated footnotes to locate Jeanson's references more clearly, but Botaniste includes a short bibliography in its conclusion, and the streamlined text is ultimately a true pleasure to read.