USS Porpoise made of bark, vines and twigs from the Botanic Garden

While visiting family in Washington DC, we visited the United States Botanic Garden. The Garden has a holiday exhibit that features model trains, specifically, Thomas the Tank Engine, which delighted my 2 year old grand nephew.  In addition to the trains and numerous models of buildings built from twigs, bark, branches and other material collected from the gardens themselves, there were also two ships from the United States Exploring Expedition of 1838 to 1842, lead by Lieutenant Charles Wilkes. The sloop of war USS Vincennes and the the brig USS Porpoise are also fancifully constructed from branches, wood, bark and vines collected from the gardens.  But what did Wilkes and his squadron have to do with the gardens? More than I realized before my visit.

The United States Botanic Garden was founded with plants brought back from the Wilkes Expedition.  It is the oldest continually operating botanic garden in the nation. As noted on the Botanic garden website:

“In 1842, the idea of a national botanic garden was reestablished when the United States Exploring Expedition to the South Seas (the Wilkes Expedition) brought a collection of living plants from around the globe to Washington, D.C. Initially placed in a specially constructed greenhouse behind the Old Patent Office Building, the plants were moved in late 1850 into a new structure on the site previously occupied by the Columbian Institute’s garden.”    

In addition to the live plants, Wilkes also brought dried plants and seeds. The dried specimens became the core of what is now the National Herbarium, an herbarium curated by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History.

Wilkes and his Exploring Expedition have been largely forgotten, yet literally live on at the garden. Four of their current plants either were brought back by Wilkes or are plants grown from plants originally provided by the expedition.

In a completely different form, the Wilkes Expedition lives on in a series of murder mysteries written by Joan Druett.   Her “Wiki Coffin series” features a detective, Wiki Coffin, who is the son of a New England whaling captain and a Maori woman.  The Beckoning Ice, the fifth of the series was long-listed for the 2014 Ngaio Marsh Award.   Read our review here.