Marietta Daisies Garden Club
The Remarkable Story of the Franklin Tree
In the late 1700s, explorer and naturalist William Bartram and his father, John Bartram often called the “King’s Botanist” traveled extensively through Pensacola and much of the southeastern United States.
They were keen observers of plant life, wildlife, and Native American culture, and they were also dedicated collectors.
Many American plant species were gathered during their journeys and sent to Europe for study, where they were preserved in gardens and arboretums.
If not for their remarkable powers of observation, at least one extraordinary native tree might have been lost forever.
In 1765, while exploring along Georgia’s Altamaha River, the Bartrams encountered a small flowering tree unlike anything they had seen before. They named it the “Franklin tree” in honor of their friend and fellow patriot Benjamin Franklin. Its scientific name, Franklinia alatamaha, recognizes both Franklin and the river near which it was discovered.
Because of its resemblance to the Loblolly Bay, the species was temporarily placed in the Gordonia genus. Early botanical literature may refer to it as Gordonia alatamaha, Gordonia pubescens var. subglabra, or Lacathea florida. Today, it is properly classified as Franklinia alatamaha, a member of the tea family (Theaceae).
William Bartram recognized the tree’s rarity. Despite his extensive travels, he never encountered it anywhere else. When he returned to Georgia in 1776, he collected seeds from the remaining trees and successfully propagated five plants at his family home in Pennsylvania.
The last confirmed sightings of Franklinia in the wild occurred between 1790 and 1803 along the original wetland floodplain of the Altamaha River. Since then, it has vanished from its native habitat. Every Franklin tree living today descends from the seeds William Bartram gathered.
The exact cause of its extinction in the wild remains uncertain, though strong theories exist. Land along the river was cleared for cotton cultivation, and the trees may have been susceptible to a fungal pathogen associated with cotton crops. With such a small endemic population, the species was highly vulnerable to habitat destruction and environmental change.
Though no longer found in the wild, the Franklin tree lives on in demonstration gardens and arboretums along the East Coast and is available through specialty nurseries for careful gardeners.
One notable example grows at the University of Georgia Marine Extension office in Brunswick, where it serves as part of an educational native landscape.
The site located less than twenty miles from the Bartrams’ original discovery features a mature Franklin tree reaching 15 to 20 feet tall. What was once a simple turf lawn has been transformed into a thriving demonstration garden filled with flowers, shrubs, and pollinator habitat, with interpretive signage sharing the tree’s remarkable story.
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