In the spring of 1775, William Bartram rode into the Cherokee mountains of western North Carolina and stayed barely two months. He never stopped writing. Travels, the book he made of that journey, appeared in 1791 and has been keeping readers company ever since — a young Philadelphia Quaker, astonished at every turn, working himself into raptures over what he called “vegetable beauties.”

On Wednesday, August 12 at noon, University Program Associate Liam Stiefel leads a walk down the Bartram Trail in the Highlands Botanical Gardens — a short interpretive path planted with some thirty species tied to William, or to his father John, the self-taught Quaker farmer whom King George III named Botanist for the Colonies.

Among them is Franklinia alatamaha. William Bartram found it on the banks of the Altamaha River in Georgia, and never found it anywhere else — nor has anyone since. It has been gone from the wild for two centuries. Nearly every Franklin tree alive on earth today, ours included, grew from seed the Bartrams stopped to collect. It flowers in late summer.

Come see what a sharp eye and a full notebook can save.

 Meet at the Highlands Nature Center
 Wednesday, August 12 · 12:00 p.m.
Free and open to the public