Michelia figo The flowers have the fragrance of ripe bananas. The drawing was made at the grand plantation, near Charleston, South Carolina, known as Middleton Place. The eighteenth-century French botanist Andre Michaux (1746-1802) was hired to plant and landscape Middleton Place. I like to imagine that he personally planted this now majestic specimen, allowing me, in a very small way, to memorialize him. Middleton Place was one of the largest and grandest of the rice-growing plantations of the Carolinas, encompassing thousands of acres, and holding thousands of African slaves. Great wealth was produced by the cheap slave labor. Some of this wealth was channeled into huge gardens, many of them elegantly landscaped by the leading botanists and horticulturists of the times. —Henry Evans
125 copies were printed and sell for $300 each.