On the Highways and in the Hedges: Kate Furbish’s Botanical Century.

In 1870, botany in the state of Maine was an underdeveloped and precarious thing. In the 1670s, John Josselyn had published a brace of books containing his observations of some of the plants of the region, and in the intervening two centuries, that promising beginning was largely left to grow cold. Aaron Young in 1840 set out a grand plan for surveying the plants of Maine, but after his first expedition the state refused to continue funding his work, and ultimately only one volume, published in 1848 and in such a small run that it all but disappeared from consciousness, was ultimately completed. George Goodale made a game effort in 1861 and 1862 that resulted in a catalogue of species he discovered, but all of his specimens were destroyed in 1866 when the Portland Museum of Natural History burned down.

Two centuries, and all that the botanical community of Maine had to show for it was a book that nobody could get their hands on, and a catalogue representing the efforts of two expeditions. It was a situation that had become beyond ridiculous, as New England botanists were fanning out to the west and south to find exciting specimens from warmer, and therefore presumably more promising, climates, while letting knowledge of the plant life of one of their own states fester in obscurity. 

The lifting of the veil on the phenomenal diversity of Maine’s botanical universe was accomplished from 1870 to 1908 largely by the efforts of one individual, Catherine “Kate” Furbish (1834-1931). She is simultaneously one of our best-known figures in the history of New England botany, her repository of 1326 watercolors of plants spread across fourteen volumes known as the Flora of Maine (1908) representing an often reproduced treasure-trove of gorgeous and scientifically precise botanical knowledge, and one of our most mysterious, alternating years of intense and well-documented activity with long periods of almost complete disappearance from the historical record. 

She was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, but her family quickly moved to Brunswick, Maine, home since 1802 to Bowdoin College after its 1794 chartering, and one of the state’s epicenters of intellectual, artistic, and abolitionist activity. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Brunswick, and Bowdoin claimed the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the disastrous but hunky future president Franklin Pierce among its roll call of distinguished early 19th century students and teachers. Furbish’s father was a successful tradesman, but also a nature enthusiast who shared his knowledge of local flora with his children on rambling forest walks. 

Furbish received a somewhat piecemeal education, as was common for most girls of well-to-do families of her era, taking some classes at a private school, where she learned the Latin that would be of use to her in her later career, while honing her artistic skills on visits to Boston and Portland through private lessons. Her first efforts at collection date from the late 1850s, but in the 1860s her botanical efforts, as far as the historical record has established, were sparse. There are many plausible reasons for her relative lack of botanizing in this time - her parents were ill, and as the only daughter the responsibility to care for them fell to her - the Civil War necessitated changes in daily life for large swaths of the nation - her own battles with neuralgia which brought intense pain into her hands and feet, making collection more difficult - whatever the reason it was not until April of 1870 that Furbish resumed in earnest her career as an amateur botanist, establishing the procedures in observation and illustration that would place her firmly in the pantheon of New England naturalists. 

What frustrated Furbish about contemporary representations of flowering plants in the United States was the lack of attention to detail they displayed. Colors, angles, relationships of parts to each other - these were all too often glossed over to produce simple and pleasing effects. Furbish resolved that her method would be different. Her illustrations were multi-staged affairs, with calculated spaces left to be filled in by details to be gathered later of plants in subsequent phases of growth. She observed seeds under microscopes, and experimented with water to paint ratios to produce different opacities to more accurately represent the color effects she was observing. Her illustrations were particularly careful in the representation of vascular structures, micro-details, stamen number variations, and the angles of different parts of the plant to each other, to ensure that later botanists had as many signifiers as possible at their disposal in the identification of species.

Her botanizing came to a temporary halt in 1873 after the death of both her parents within a month of each other. She left the family home and settled for a while with relations in New Castle, Delaware, spending some time during the vacation season at the seaside resort of Cape May, New Jersey, and then resided for a while in the nation’s capital, listening to political speeches and taking in the museums. There were isolated trips to gather plants that were new to her, but by and large this was a period of sampling what life outside of Brunswick had to offer. In 1875, she returned to Brunswick and settled in a house bought from her younger brother John, which was to serve in the years to come as her scientific base of operations, though she often travelled to Boston to take in the intellectual climate, making the acquaintance there of fellow amateur botanist Anne Jackson and, through her, of George Davenport (1833-1907), the latter of whom would be Furbish’s primary botanical correspondent until his death. 

Possessing a solid permanent home, and in contact with other serious botanists who encouraged her in her work, she returned to botanical work with a vengeance in 1876, pushing out from Brunswick to collect and sketch in Kennebec County, where she produced some particularly treasured black and white renditions of the trees of the region, as well as Androscoggin, Oxford, and Franklin counties, representing a solid swath of the western half of the state. In 1880, she began her northeastern push, centered at first at Orono, where she had ready access to the enticing botanical specimens available at the region’s boglands, and where she also met a six year old boy named Merritt who would go on to become the nation’s pre-eminent botanical mind, and Furbish’s particular friend, in the decades to come. 

From Orono, she turned northwards to Fort Fairfield on the Aroostook River, thence to Caribou, and ultimately to Van Buren, a town on the Canadian border with access to the St. John River. It was here, in 1880, that she made the discovery that she is most known for, that of Pedicularis furbishiae:

This semiparasitic plant requires an incredibly specific set of conditions to be successful, and to this date has not been found outside a specific stretch of the St. John River. Furbish’s keen eye saw that this was a distinctly different plant than its brethren in the lousewort family (a deeply unfortunate name stemming from an old superstition that cows who ate the plant would be infected with lice). She sent her observations and samples to Davenport, who forwarded them to Sereno Watson for confirmation that this represented a new species, and for naming it (the honor of naming a new species at this time falling to the individual confirming its uniqueness, not to the discoverer). He originally wanted to name the plant for its region of discovery, but Davenport insisted that, as Furbish was the country’s central expert on Maine plants, who devoted her time and resources entirely to cataloguing and documenting its species, and who as a woman was never going to get the official recognition awarded to men (the New England Botanical Club did not allow women to join its rank until the 1960s), it would be kind of nice to do her this one honor, and name the plant that she had discovered for her. 

Watson was swayed, and in 1881 entered the new plant into the record as Pedicularis furbishiae. The discovery of a new species was a delightful cap to a remarkable year. In 1880, Furbish catalogued 208 species, fifty of which were not on any list of the region’s flora. In 1881, she continued this arc, leaving earlier to catch all of the plants she had noted before at different stages of their growth, and continuing past Van Buren and up to Fort Kent, where she was given the nickname the “Posy Lady” by the locals who fell over themselves to offer her help on her quest. Returning from this expedition, she wrote her travels and discoveries up in a series of articles for the American Naturalist, and gave talks to local natural history gatherings. 

By 1883, Furbish was approaching her fiftieth birthday, and was long overdue for the obligatory Grand Tour of Europe that all respectable, educated, and decently well-off individuals were expected to undertake at least once in their lives. Furbish left for the continent in June of 1833, intending to stay with a tour group until France, where she wanted to live in Paris for a year to learn the language and perfect her art, in particular taking advantage of the fine quality of European paper that allowed her to render colors with precise exactitude (the only curse words you will find in Furbish’s hand are those referring to the quality of American paper and how it consistently prevented her from achieving the precision she sought).

We are not sure when she returned from Paris, for Furbish essentially disappears from the historical records at this point, and does not substantively return again until 1891, for reasons almost entirely unknown. One theory about why she reignited her botanical career in 1891 concerns the young boy she met in Orono during her travels a decade earlier. He was Merritt Fernald (1873-1950), and in 1891 though he was just a teenager he received an invitation to come to Harvard and work in the herbarium there. He had apparently maintained his connection with Furbish through the intervening years, and once arrived at Harvard carried out a regular correspondence with her as he moved up through the ranks on his meteoric rise. That constant contact with a young man experiencing all the enthusiasm of his earliest years as a professional botanist might have proved a tonic to Furbish, who resumed collecting, and even took on an official position as the botanist in residence at Poland Spring House, a spa treatment facility where she oversaw the creation of a display on local flora and the publication of informational material that vacationers might use to guide their own botanical adventures. 

These were also the years that saw her in a continuous state of collection, organization, and education, pushing into new territories in spite of her regular bouts of neuralgia, consulting with experts at the Harvard Herbarium, giving talks of her own, and helping in 1895 to found the state’s first organization of botanical enthusiasts, the Josselyn Botanical Society of Maine, which this year celebrated its 130th year of service in popularizing the flora of the state of Maine, and encouraging a wider interest in plantlife throughout the state. 

Furbish worked with a purpose to bring to as complete a state as possible her specimen collection and illustrations of the flora of Maine, while also delving into a new interest, courtesy of Merritt Fernald, in mushrooms. In 1908, she was ready to place her magnum opus in responsible hands, presenting the 14 volumes of her flowering plant illustrations, some 1326 watercolors and sketches in all, to Bowdoin college, along with two volumes of her mushroom illustrations. Meanwhile, a selection of some four thousand sheets of herbarium specimens that she had been collecting since the late 1850s, including the original specimens of the lousewort that bears her name, were handed over to Harvard, where they were gratefully incorporated into the master collection there. 

Having handed over the bulk of her life’s work and collecting, Furbish rested content that she had achieved her life’s purpose and that death would soon come for her. To her surprise, however, she just kept living, and we have letters from her into the late 1910s talking about plants she has found and collected. Finally, in 1921 she made the decision to take up residence at Grant’s Hospital in Brunswick, reasoning that she didn’t want to waste her time and energy in housekeeping and social calls, but rather wanted to spend her time observing plants as much as possible, while leaving to other people the business of cleaning and fretting after her health. She lived for another decade, passing away finally on December 6, 1931, of heart failure, at the age of 97. 

FURTHER READING:

In 2016 the full Flora of Maine was published by Rowman and Littlefield. It is a book I hunger to own, but at $450 that’s not happening any time soon. So, instead we have to make do with smaller selections of her work. Kate Furbish and the Flora of Maine (1995) by Ada and Frank Graham is a wonderful account not just of Furbish’s life and work, but of New England botanizing more generally. Wildflowers of Maine (2017) is a nice little hardcover with less biographical information, but many vibrant reproductions of Furbish’s most engaging watercolors, with geographical references of where and when she collected each plant. Louise Coburn wrote an appreciation of Furbish’s life in 1924 that I’ve never been able to track down, but what is pretty easy to flag down a copy of is Marcia Bonta’s classic 1991 text Women in the Field: America’s Pioneering Women Naturalists, which I find myself referencing All The Time.