Issue link: https://newsleader.uberflip.com/i/243343
Sarasota News Leader January 17, 2014 The rare celestial lily was "lost" for 150 years after Bartram discovered it in northeast Florida. Last May, I was fortunate to find some in bloom along a road in St. John's County. Page 100 off the St. Johns River (now called Idlewilde Dock). "I was attacked on all sides, several endeavoring to overset the canoe," he wrote. His account of them "belching water and smoke" would be ridiculed. No creatures could be that big, that fearsome, that numerous. But those were the days before alligator belts, handbags and shoes drove these creatures to the brink of extinction. Later, respected naturalists — including Florida's Archie Carr — vindicated him. William drew animals from life. The Florida scrub jay launching herself from a scrub oak at Oscar Scherer State Park, a dancing sandhill crane and the limpkin he calls the "crying bird" — which I see in the retention pond at Southgate Mall — all bring him to mind. His wonderful drawing of a gopher tortoise inspires me as I try to capture its reptilian Upon his return to Philadelphia in 1777, magnificence. William wrote "Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West When first I ran into an eastern diamondback Florida." Published in 1791, the book is still rattlesnake, the largest venomous snake in North America, the word Bartram used to in print. It includes some of his remarkable describe it — "magnanimous" — came to drawings, most of which are in the British mind. How I hoped he was right as I stood Museum. His lyrical descriptions of the New World inspired British poets William shaking in my shoes, photographing it. Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alligators loomed large in the Bartram saga. the latter of whom, in Kubla Khan, evoked One night a horde pursued him into an inlet Bartram's descriptions of Florida's springs. A bison dozes amid Alachua Savanna.