Great Forest - John Clayton & Flora, The

Frye, Harriet

John Clayton was a botanist and the clerk of Gloucester County (ca. 1720–1773). Born and educated in England, he first appears in colonial records in 1720 as the Gloucester County clerk, a position he held for more than fifty years. He owned a tobacco plantation and more than thirty enslaved people, and by 1735 was regularly providing naturalists such as Mark Catesby and John Frederick Gronovius with botanical specimens to be identified. Clayton himself identified and was the first to name the genus Agastache, a group of perennial, flowering herbs. In 1737, the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus named the wildflowers of the genus Claytonia in Clayton’s honor. During this same time period, Clayton compiled for Gronovius a Catalogue of Herbs, Fruits, and Trees Native to Virginia, which Gronovius translated into Latin and published as Flora Virginica, without Clayton’s permission, in 1739. This and subsequent editions were the first, and until the mid-twentieth century, the only compilations of Virginia‘s native plants. Clayton was elected to the American Philosophical Society (1743), the Swedish Royal Academy of Science (1747), and the Virginian Society for the Promotion of Usefull Knowledge (1773), of which he was the first president. He died on December 23 of that same year.ative Biography of America's First Botanist

1990.