Excerpt from this story (book review) from Inside Climate News:
In a quiet corner of the oldest botanic garden in North America grows a tree with long, graceful branches and leaves that curl like rust-colored tongues. When it’s blooming, the tree’s snow-white flowers are said to smell like honeysuckle, but at the end of November, its branches are bare, and its leaves are mostly heaped on the ground, a browning pile on the edge of the lawn.
Though it looks unassuming in winter, the tree has a prominent place on the maps of the garden where it’s cared for, Bartram’s Garden, on a stretch of land in Philadelphia hemmed in by the city on three sides and the Schuylkill River on the fourth. At the base of the trunk sits a placard with its name: Franklinia alatamaha, a species of tea tree that has been extinct in the sandy southern swamplands it came from for more than a century.
The elusive Franklinia appears in the writer Annie Proulx’s new book “Fen, Bog & Swamp,” one more unique treasure in a litany of treasures that Proulx uncovers in the world’s wetlands, past and present. Proulx writes about the father and son botanists John and William Bartram, who found a grove of Franklinia growing along the banks of the Altamaha River in Georgia in 1765.
The Bartrams named the tree for Benjamin Franklin and carried its seeds back to Pennsylvania, where they cultivated the plant. All of the Franklinia trees that still exist are believed to be descendants of those original seeds; in a way, the Franklinia trees in Bartram’s Garden are wetland refugees, transplanted from their shrinking, warming natural habitat to the North, where curator Joel Fry told me the caretakers mimic the Altamaha’s acidic soil by spreading pine needles around the roots.
In William Bartram’s 18th-century work, which detailed his travels through the swamps and forests of the American Southeast, Proulx writes that we can experience “a wild tropical south we can know only through his words and drawings.”
Proulx’s project is not so different from Bartram’s. In our age of escalating environmental crises, she is driven to document the disappeared and the disappearing, all the threatened remnants of our precious wetlands, from ancient English fens to Ohio’s now-drained Great Black Swamp. It’s a mission that has never been more urgent: The 2018 Global Wetland Outlook announced that wetlands are “disappearing three times faster than forests” and that 35 percent of the world’s wetlands were destroyed between 1970 and 2015.