Chasing Lewis’s Monkeyflower: The Amazing Afterlife of the Lewis and Clark Expedition’s Wild Plants

Caption (image above): Mimulus lewisii. Photo: Heritage Flower Farm

Chasing Lewis’s Monkeyflower is the 200-year saga of finding, losing, and finding the wild plants collected on America’s first exploration west, the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Thomas Jefferson handpicked Meriwether Lewis to lead the expedition, gather notable specimens along the way, and then write the journals, with one volume to include science-worthy descriptions and classifications of the plants that Lewis collected and pressed to preserve. Not a botanist, Lewis needed help to write this part of the journals. Ambition, deceit, theft, wealth, debt, alcoholism, loss, suicide, serendipity, and stubborn persistence cross the plants’ paths in Philadelphia, New York, and London. This is the first work detailing the places, practices, and times of a cavalcade of people who touched the plants. It’s a fascinating chronicle of an unexplored byway of the great American story.

About the Speaker

ELIZABETH ADELMAN gardened on weekends and summer evenings while practicing law. Twenty-five years ago, she gave in and started Heritage Flower Farm, an award-winning nursery growing perennial flowers, now featured in botanic gardens, historic sites, and backyard gardens around the country. About a decade ago, a friend introduced her to the plants collected on the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and she was hooked. She spent winters researching and writing about the people, times, places, and events creating the mysteries, losses, and rediscoveries of the plant specimens across two continents and 200 years.