French botanist and explorer. Describing André Michaux, the Marquis de Lafayette noted that he had risen 'from a simple farmer to a name among learned men'. Born in 1746 near Versailles on an estate farm in the shadow of the royal palace, Michaux's schooling ended at age 14, yet his agricultural skills became so outstanding that they gained the attention of naturalist Louis Guillaume Le Monnier, who persuaded him to take up the study of botany.

As a student of Bernard de Jussieux, Michaux worked at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris and from 1779 to 1781 undertook botanical expeditions to the Auvergne region, the Pyrenées, Spain and England. In 1782 he was posted to Persia, where for three years he explored widely through hostile territory torn by civil war, collecting seeds and plants as he worked his way across Persia from the Caspian Sea to the Indian Ocean. At one point he wrote enthusiastically: 'Gazing at that multitude of plants...I was often dazzled and obliged to calm myself...I could not sleep at night and awaited the day with impatience'. He returned to France with extensive collections of then rarely known Middle East specimens, among them seeds of Rosa persica and a species of Campulanaceae from which L'Heritier later created the genus Michauxia.

In 1785, just two years after the American Revolution, Michaux was appointed as royal botanist and sent to the United States, accompanied by his young son and a gardener, to search American forests for new species of shrubs and trees to rebuild the forests of France, which had lost much of its best timber during its wars with England. There he established a nursery near Hackensack, New Jersey, and later a 111-acre garden outside Charleston, South Carolina, which offered him a flavour of French culture and a welcome from its Huguenot community. From this base over the next decade, Michaux made collecting trips throughout the wilderness frontiers of North America in West Virginia, Kentucky, Spanish Florida and up into the Canadian province of Quebec and on to the Hudson Bay region. Travelling by canoe, on horse, and by foot, he was often the first trained botanist to visit an area. He also made a trip to the Bahamas, where he was well received by the British governor, to whom he gave seeds for Joseph Banks.

On one trip into the Carolina Mountains he discovered a magnificent evergreen shrub ablaze with purple blossoms. He named it Rhododendron catawbiense, today one of the genetic parents of hybrid rhododendrons found in gardens worldwide. From these many trips Michaux shipped back to France thousands of trees, shrubs and boxes of seeds, but, in turn, also managed to introduce new plants to America, among them the mimosa or silk tree Albizia julibrissen, the crape myrtle, Lagerstroemia indica, the tea plant, and the camellia.

Michaux returned France in 1796, having barely survived a shipwreck off the Dutch coast, only to discover that of the thousands of trees he had sent from North America only a few had survived the ravages of the Revolution. After Le Monnier's death, Michaux, who was in financial ruin because the republican government refused to pay him the salary he had been promised by the king, moved into his former mentor's house, and there took care of the garden and began work on his two famous books, the Oaks of America and the Flora of North America. He had hopes of returning to his plantations in North America to recoup his losses, and to travel in Mexico and the Far North, but instead was offered a place as a naturalist on Baudin's ill-fated expedition to Australia, which he reluctantly accepted. In April 1801, after quarreling with Baudin, he left the ship in Mauritius and sailed on his own to Madagascar to study the plant life. There he was overcome by tropical fever and died. The Michaux name is attached to hundreds of plants and today botanists everywhere come to Paris to study at the Herbarium Michaux. His son François André also became a celebrated botanist and author of the Sylva of North America.

Sources:
R. hickel, 1928, "André Michaux", Bulletin de la Société Dendrologique de France, August 1928: 1-23
J.F.M. Hoeniger, "Michaux, André", Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, accessed July 2008.