OIL PAINTING: Franklinia alatamaha, 1833
Audubon's double elephant folio engravings Birds of America, published in parts between 1828 and 1838, and purchased for South Carolina College by vote of the legislature in 1831, are also important for their botanical backgrounds. The bird depicted here has been named for Audubon's Charleston friend, the Rev. John Bachman. By the late Victorian period, the plant (which was painted by Bachman's sister-in-law Maria Martin) was no longer found growing in South Carolina; interestingly, in 1882, Ravenel himself published a paper about this plant in American Naturalist.