Event Description
This talk explores what the plants collected and cached by black rats (Rattus rattus) in a historic botanic garden can reveal about the garden’s evolving landscape. Focusing on Bartram’s Garden, which was founded in 1728 by Quaker farmer and naturalist John Bartram and later expanded by his descendants, Ally Mitchem considers how plants, people, and animals together generated knowledge and transformed domestic and intellectual life across the 18th and 19th centuries. This research examines what these cached botanical assemblages reveal not only about the rodents themselves and the natural historians who cataloged the flora, but also about the laborers, residents, and non-human life that shaped the environment.
Using historical, paleo-climatological, and archaeobotanical sources, including desiccated plant matter gathered by rats living in the Bartram home, Ally Mitchem traces how plants moved through scientific, commercial, and domestic circuits. Ultimately, she argues that the production of natural history knowledge in this period cannot be fully understood without accounting for the diverse, entangled relationships between humans and non-humans. Sites like Bartram’s Garden were not just nodes in global botanical networks, but lived environments where daily human-animal-plant interactions profoundly shaped early understandings of the natural world.
Event Speaker
Alexandria Mitchem Hansen, Italian Academy Fellow at Columbia University
Event Information
Free and open to the public; registration required. Registration for guests without an active Columbia University ID closes at 1 PM on March 23. Contact [email protected] or [email protected] for questions.
This event is part of the New York History of Science Lecture Series.
Sponsoring Organizations:
- Columbia University in the City of New York
- NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study
- The Graduate Center, City University of New York
- The New York Academy of Medicine
- The New York Academy of Sciences
