Dear Madeleine Françoise,

Not long ago I sat under the cedar of Lebanon planted in 1734 by Bernard de Jussieu while you and everyone in the garden looked on. It is a huge, wide tree now, its lush needles and spreading branches providing welcome shade to visitors at the Jardin des Plantes as your beautiful park is now called. This gigantic evergreen, shaped like a little pyramid when you saw it but luxuriously broad and open now, outlived you and will long outlive me. Other trees planted centuries ago are still here too: I recognized an Acacia, grown from seed originating in my part of the world, North America, which was already here in your day, and there is the tall Sophora Japonica, transplanted in 1747 by Bernard de Jussieu, again while you all watched, from the Place Dauphine where it first took root. Next to the cedar is the Labyrinth, a tall hill with rows of hedges in rising circular paths that take you around and up to the gazebo at the top, one of the oldest metal constructions in the world built at Buffon’s orders and from which one can see all of Paris. I strolled through the majestic avenues of plane trees, for which we also have Buffon to thank, and enjoyed the famous banks of roses, irises, and peonies, picturing you bent over them as you sketched and painted. The Jardin Alpin, the materials for which were accumulated during your day, is now a secluded space for plants from mountain climates that you can only get to through a tunnel passage. The big old pistachio tree, grown out of seeds from China and still there, fascinated an earlier Jardin botanist, Sébastien Vaillant, who figured out—by observing its sterility until he mingled its flowers with those of another tree of the same species—that plants reproduce sexually just like animals. He was the first to introduce terms like male, female, and ovary into discussions of floral anatomy. This nomenclature initially created a scandal but was soon picked up by Linnaeus, whom you met in the garden in 1738 and for whom plant sexuality was central. He wrote and spoke freely about it with you and Bernard de Jussieu. It wasn’t shocking anymore....