Deciphering botanical notation in William Jackson Hooker’s Flora Boreali-Americana (1829–1840)

The nineteenth century was plagued with slight variations of similar reference methods used to cite botanical authors in botanical publications. Abbreviations were used to condense names and sources to save on space in a manner that was still accessible. The first director of Kew Gardens, William Jackson Hooker (1785–1865), used a distinctive notation style in his Flora Boreali-Americana (1829–40) with the goal of summarising all known plants found within British North America in the early to mid-nineteenth century. However, Hooker had never set foot on the continent and so was reliant on a network of correspondence to publish his work. Decoding the format of Hooker’s plant entries within the Flora Boreali-Americana sheds light on how botanical science was researched, published, and consumed in the nineteenth century. Hooker’s complete reliance on external contributors in a time when most of his contemporaries remained eager to prove their encounters with plants shifted the emphasis onto botanical collectors. While each named collector deserves their own essay investigating their botanical contributions, this article aims to lay the groundwork for research into untold stories of those communities of people who participated in botanical science as residents, travelling botanists, local seed sellers, physicians, etc. Deciphering the meaning and purpose of botanical notation provides a first step in unravelling the sexist historicisation of botany, which credits the male armchair botanist for the work of his network made up of diverse nationalities, classes, and genders.