In Virginia, it doesn’t take long for a budding plant enthusiast to encounter colonial botanist John Clayton. There’s Claytonia virginica, the Virginia spring-beauty; Osmunda claytoniana, the interrupted fern; Lonicera sempervirens “John Clayton,” a cultivar of the trumpet honeysuckle; the John Clayton chapter of the Virginia Native Plant Society.
At the Flora of Virginia Project, Clayton is on our minds for another reason too: the most recent flora for our state, Flora Virginica, was published in the mid-1700s—based on Clayton’s specimens and writings.
A native of England, Clayton came to Williamsburg around 1715 to join his father, who was attorney-general of the colony. Educated in law (presumably, like much of his line, at Cambridge), in 1720 Clayton became clerk of courts for Gloucester County, which included all the Middle Peninsula—some 164,000 acres and the wealthiest county in Virginia. He and wife Elizabeth Whiting set up residence on a 450-acre plantation near the Piankatank River, probably in present-day Mathews County. They had eight children.
Clayton’s interest in natural history probably grew out of his friendship
with artist and naturalist Mark Catesby, in Virginia since 1712. Clayton developed a botanical garden, began collecting
specimens, and, through introductions by William Byrd II, became well known in America and Europe.
In the early 1730s he began sending specimens to Catesby, once again in England. The specimens reached John Frederick Gronovius in the Netherlands, where they were also studied by Swedish naturalist Carolus Linneaus. In Linnaeus’s groundbreaking Species Plantarum (1753), in which he implemented his binomial nomenclature, much of the science of North American plants came out of Clayton's specimens.
Building on these and a manuscript of Clayton's, Gronovius published Flora Virginica in two volumes, in 1739 and 1742, mentioning Clayton on the title page. Gronovius’s son published the second edition in 1762 in his father’s name, but without mentioning Clayton. Clayton also drafted a second edition, but it was never published. Still clerk of courts, he died in 1773. His manuscript, his specimens, and records that would have shed light on his life were destroyed when the British burned the courthouse in Gloucester.
Some of Clayton’s specimens remain in Linnaeus’s herbarium at the Linnaean Society of London. Gronovius’s lot may now be found in the John Clayton Herbarium of the Natural History Museum in London. (To see a photograph of one of Clayton’s specimens of Claytonia virginica, click the small image, above.)
What little else survived on Clayton was gleaned and fortunately amassed by Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy Smith Berkeley in their biography, John Clayton: Pioneer of American Botany(1963). “The details of Clayton’s life are little known and much of what has been written about him is fragmentary and inaccurate,” they write, adding that errors have been committed by well-known historians and even Thomas Jefferson!