Highly respected among her male peers in the 18th century, Jane Colden received great accolades and is generally recognized as the first female American botanist. Yet she went largely unnoticed by the greater scientific community for well over a century after her death.
Entry in Colden’s manuscript describing the new species Gardenia. Reproduced with the permission of the Trustees of the Natural History Museum.
Born in New York City in 1724, she grew up in the Hudson Valley on the estate of her father, Cadwallader Colden, who was a lieutenant governor of New York. The area was then called Coldenham, but we would recognize it as a region just west of Newburgh in Orange County, New York.
Annie Virnig is a graduate student in the Commodore Matthew Perry Graduate Studies Program at The New York Botanical Garden.
“The beauty of this species is its undoing,” wrote New York Botanical Garden botanist James Luteyn in 1983 regarding this flower, which is native to the Andean cloud forests of Colombia. Since then, his words have only become truer.
The founders of El Queremal in southwestern Colombia were inspired to name the town in honor of this beautiful and intoxicatingly fragrant flower that grows there, called quereme de la rosa by locals and known scientifically as Cavendishia adenophora.
Long before settlers reached El Queremal, the indigenous people of the area, the Anaconas, valued quereme de la rosa and believed it to be a charm for love and enchantment. The story goes that if a woman wears the quereme flower, its beautiful fragrance will inspire men to fall in love with her and women to be drawn to her in friendship. Likewise, if a man wears the flower in his lapel, women will flock to him. One story told in El Queremal involves a man who could not rid himself of the women who pursued him after he wore the quereme, so he ran away to live the rest of his days deep in the rainforest.
