Franklinia alatamaha and the Stamp of Extinction

• In Event: Visual Approaches to Environmental History

Abstract

My larger project, “Remembering Nature: Memorials and Monuments to Extinction,” examines tales of species decline and the cultural representations that follow. What place do extinct species hold in our construction of nature and of culture? They may cease to exist in the wild, but their lives continue in our constructions and reconstructions of them. The paper I will present in this panel examines a postage stamp issued in 1969 on the occasion of the 11th International Botanical Congress featuring Franklinia alatamaha—a species extinct in the wild since the start of the 19th century. Of the four stamps in the series, each representing a plant illustrated on top of its natural habitat, this is the only one that includes an architectural element—a white columned plantation-style house—thus implying a relationship between this natural extinction and broader cultural changes on the landscape of the American South. To unpack the meaning of this conflation of natural and cultural change, I trace the history of the species back to 18th-century trans-national exchanges of early colonial botanists who fought over this species designation; its propagation in botanical gardens (first by William Bartram who is credited for saving the species); and the dialogue about the tree in the region of its origin, Georgia’s Altamaha River basin. Through this stamp, as well as other representations of the species and its habitat, I find the inheritance of visual representations of wildness, drawn from early American landscape aesthetics, here extended to landscapes in decline. How are the aesthetics of architectural ruins related to threatened species? Is the decline of nature also a cultural decline? What message about extinction did the members of the Botanical Congress wish to relay to a larger public through this particular representation of a species that is “extinct in the wild”?

Author

• Kelly Enright, Flagler College