Thomas Walter and his plants

This is the story of Thomas Walter, pioneer owner of a rice plantation on the Santee River, South Carolina, and of the plants that he knew and named. In the 1780s, with the American Revolution a recent memory, Thomas Walter, an Englishman by birth, gained title to a large plantation in Berkeley County, South Carolina, on the south bank and bottomlands of the Santee River, inland from the seaport city of Charleston. There he lived for the remainder of his busy life, raising rice, involving himself in the politics and business affairs of his agricultural community, and yet finding time to study the works of the great Swedish botanist, Carl Linnaeus, and to prepare a similar tabulation of the Carolina plants he found around him. Many of these plants Walter believed to be new to science; to document his findings he gave them binomial names and brief Latin descriptions. Walter’s Flora Caroliniana published in 1788, was the first flora written in America that used Linnaeus’ classification system and binomial nomenclature. Of these plants, a large proportion were indeed unknown to European botanists, and the names Walter gave them are used even today as the unambiguous scientific designations for many important American plants. [This book records] what can be said about Thomas Walter and his botanical achievements. This will be done in two parts. First, his life history is here reported and placed in context with the early Carolina political and agricultural world in which he lived. Second, a tabulation is provided of Walter’s scientific work, of the many plants he discovered in the Carolinas, and of the taxonomic value of these names to the modern world.--Introduction.