Jane Colden

the long version

"In eighteenth-century America, 'A female botanist was a rare thing to contemplate,' according to Raymond Phineas Stearns in his 1970 compendium, Science in the British Colonies of America. The daughter of the colonial lieutenant governor of the colony of New York and a naturalist well known to the international circle of botanists, Jane Colden became her father's protégé. She corresponded regularly with several of her father's friends, exchanging information about plants. Jane produced an herbal describing in both words and drawings 341 plants that grew in and around her father's 3,000-acre estate west of Newburgh, New York. The manuscript now resides in the Natural History Museum of London." -- cover.