These tours included visits to Roan Mountain, Mount Mitchell (then known as Black Mountain), Grandfather Mountain, Table Rock, Hawksbill, and the Linville Gorge. His last trips to the North Carolina mountains were made in 17. In 1793 the French consul to the United States, Edmund Charles Genet, sent Michaux to Kentucky and Tennessee on a diplomatic mission regarding the transfer of French and Spanish lands in the West, but again his role as a botanist overshadowed his efforts as a negotiator. Michaux also made scientific expeditions to Florida (1788), the Bahamas (1789), and the Hudson Bay (1792). He returned in 1788, this time entering North Carolina through Charlotte and following the Catawba River up into Burke County before proceeding across the Blue Ridge Mountains. Following the route taken by William Bartram, a Philadelphia naturalist who had explored the area in 1775, he entered the state through Georgia and studied the flora along the French Broad River. Later the same year Michaux discovered the botanical bounty of the Southern Appalachians and made the first of at least five visits to western North Carolina. He bought a plantation ten miles from the city that served as his nursery and shipping center for the rest of his American stay. On a trip to South Carolina he found Charleston a more suitable climate for his botanical collection, and in 1787 he made it his headquarters. Michaux also included a number of live game birds with these shipments. Many of these specimens were shipped back to France and replanted in the gardens of Rambouillet and Versailles. He set up a nursery at Bergen, N.J., where he deposited a wide variety of trees, shrubs, and wildflowers that he had gathered on trips through New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. Soon after returning to France in 1785, he was commissioned by the French government to study the trees in North America, to send back specimens for the royal gardens, and to ascertain their value for naval construction.Īccompanied by his fifteen-year-old son, Michaux arrived in New York in October 1785. In 1782 he was appointed secretary to the French consul in Persia, but once there, he gave up his post and spent two years studying the plant life of the Tigris and Euphrates valley. He began his plant-collecting travels in 1779 with trips to England, the Auvergne Mountains, and the Pyrenees. For the next decade, Michaux devoted himself to an even more intensive study of botany and horticulture. In 1769 he married Cecile Claye, who died eleven months later, just after the birth of their son, François André. From an early age he was trained in the agricultural sciences in order to follow in his father's footsteps in managing farmland on the royal estate. 1746–November 1802Īndré Michaux, French botanist, explorer, and writer, was born at Satory, near Versailles.
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