Mémoire sur le phormium tenax, improprement appelé lin de la Nouvelle-Zélande

First separate edition of this memoir by Faujas de Saint-Fond, issued from volume XIX of the Annales du Muséum d’histoire naturelle with its own title-page and the imprint of A. Belin. It is illustrated with an hors-texte copper-engraved plate by Plée after Turpin, still bearing at the head the indications “Tom. 19” and “Pl. 20” from its original appearance in the Annales (Pritzel 2823).

A pleasing copy preserved in its original state, in temporary pink paper wrappers. In the CCFr, we have located copies only at the Institut, Rouen and Montpellier; no copy appears to be currently recorded in the general catalogue of the BnF.

The phormium had reached France a few years earlier aboard the Naturaliste of the Baudin expedition. Several plants were entrusted to the Muséum and subsequently distributed through different departments in an effort to acclimatise them. The specimen given to the Freycinet family proved particularly important: in the spring of 1813, in the garden of the father of Louis-Claude and Henri de Freycinet, both former officers of the expedition, a flower spike finally appeared. Faujas, a neighbour of the family, followed the event closely and presented it as the first flowering of Phormium tenax observed in France.

Naturalists had long been interested in the plant less for its flower than for its fibre. Labillardière had studied its remarkable strength and praised qualities sufficient to attract the attention of the Navy; Faujas takes up these observations, compares them with the cultivation trials carried out in the Drôme, and reviews the descriptions published since Banks and Forster. Across these few pages, the phormium thus moves from being a curiosity brought back from the Pacific to a plant that French naturalists were now attempting to cultivate, measure and put to practical use.

Turpin’s plate accompanies this precise moment in its French acclimatisation. Retaining the printed references inherited from the Annales, it preserves a material trace of the memoir’s first appearance, while the present separate issue gives it an independent existence.

From the Pacific to the Freycinet garden, and from the garden to the printed page, this rare separate issue follows almost step by step the acclimatisation of the phormium in France; still preserved in its original pink wrappers, it retains in its very form the freshness of that first botanical observation.