Hoping to rescue him from obscurity, in 1976 Harvard professor Richard Evans Schultes (1915–2001) described Victorian botanist Richard Spruce (1817–1893) as “among the greatest naturalists ever to have engaged in collecting” (Schultes 1976). Schultes, widely known as the “father of ethnobotany,” spent much of his career retracing Spruce’s fifteen-year expedition through South America (1849–1864). Following Spruce’s steps, he tracked down plants ranging from economically valuable rubber and palm trees to mind-altering psychedelics. Along the way and for decades afterwards, he read and reinterpreted Spruce’s anthropological observations, published his manuscripts and letters, organized commemorative conferences on his behalf, and even crowdsourced a plaque for Spruce’s home in Yorkshire. Schultes was, in short, hopelessly devoted to a man who died twenty-two years before his own birth. As a result, Spruce’s legacy, along with Schultes’s, became enmeshed within the emerging field of ethnobotany, defining almost a century of research and training in the plant sciences.¹

Following the interwoven lives of Spruce and Schultes, I take on the larger history of Amazonian ethnobotany—a murky discipline defined by engagement with Indigenous communities that both men considered “primitive” (Spruce 1908; Schultes 1988). While Schultes’s thinking about the people with whom he lived, worked, and studied evolved over the course of the twentieth century, he nevertheless engaged in a sort of salvage ethnobotany, recording information about both plants and peoples he feared would be lost through  colonial systems established during the nineteenth century,  partially by collectors like Spruce. Indeed, ethnobotany legitimized knowledge extraction under the banner of science and environmental conservation and reaffirmed hero-worship and mythmaking about the region in shockingly linear ways. How can we understand the history and practice of ethnobotany without centering the stories of a handful of white men—seemingly the opposite goal of the field itself? Can ethnobotany exist at all without its colonial past, given the power dynamics still deeply at work?

Leaving for the Amazon in 1849, Spruce’s goals were manifold. In collecting and describing the plants of Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru, the botanist found himself pulled between his scientific obsession with bryophytes (mosses, liverworts, and hornworts), his need to secure ongoing funding through endeavors like cinchona-smuggling (which facilitated long-term settler colonialism across the British Empire thanks to the extraction of anti-febrile quinine), and his daily life with the Indigenous guides, porters, and experts that made this work possible. Spruce’s writings exemplify the complexities of colonial fieldwork—a concept recently problematized by historians Rosanna Dent, Etienne Benson, and Cameron Brinitzer—oscillating between attempts to record Indigenous customs, languages, and interactions with plants while also remarking on their “laziness” and what he considered to be their cultural primitivity (Dent 2022; Brinitzer and Benson 2022). During his time in the forests and tributaries of the Amazon, Spruce collected around 14,000 herbarium specimens and over 300 “ethnobotanical” objects—many now housed at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew—ranging from baskets and weapons to musical instruments and sacred objects (Cornish and Nesbitt 2014). Nonetheless, the botanist died relatively unknown and impoverished, never achieving widespread scientific recognition in his day.

Cue Schultes. Crediting his love for Amazonian botany to having Spruce’s posthumously published Notes of a Botanist read to him as a child, Schultes wove the explorer’s work into his career both as a student and as a professor and curator at Harvard (Kandell 2001; Schultes 1990). While Schultes is remembered for collecting and describing thousands of plant species (including hallucinogenics like ayahuasca) and for his critical work on rubber plants during World War II, his carefully-crafted persona—influenced by his admiration for Spruce—ultimately facilitated his success and helped bring ethnobotany into the public eye (Sheldrake 2020). Photographs of Schultes posing shirtless, smoking with Indigenous Amazonians, and perched atop rocks in colonial garb (pith helmet included) present the image of the quintessential explorer, albeit one deeply entrenched in the communities he studied (Davis 2004). In his own sensationalist book, Schultes’s former student, Wade Davis, described him as “the last of the great plant explorers in the Victorian tradition” (Davis 1985). Schultes’s efforts to bring Spruce the attention he believed he deserved helped craft this legacy. While Spruce is still understudied historically, he has been embraced by botanists as a skillful collector and taxonomist, and it is difficult to engage with the work of one man without running across the other (Seaward 2010).

Unpacking these hagiographic legacies within the field leaves us with a troubled view of ethnobotany, and especially salvage ethnobotany. How do we reconcile Schultes’s devotion to cataloguing and preserving the plants, languages, and customs of Indigenous Amazonians, tightly bound up in his anxieties around permanent loss, with his obsession with Spruce, an agent of colonialism? By reframing this continued interest in Indigenous plant expertise as savage knowledge, Raphael Uchôa places Schultes in a legacy of ethnoscience, arguing that the desire to know the “primitive” extended beyond the “end” of the colonial period (Uchôa 2024). Indeed, scholars have connected salvage ethnobotany to a larger tradition of extractive ethnoscience that has separated Indigenous knowledge from “Western science” in paternalistic, racializing ways (Uchôa, Müller-Wille, and Mercer 2024). Fueled by fears of loss, quite a bit of ethnobotanical material—specimens, written documents, and even sacred objects—now fill the cabinets and hallways of natural history collections throughout the Global North.

While in recent years some institutions, including Kew, have begun to consider repatriation or less direct forms of knowledge redistribution, historians of the field must also reckon with these complicated, personality-driven legacies of colonialism—including in recognizing our own parts within them. Ethnobotany has been shaped by a small number of practitioners who, in turn, trained or continue to train scholars currently at work: myself included.² After years of studying Spruce in my larger research on nineteenth century botanical collecting in the construction of the “tropics,” I recently found myself uneasily connected to a man I thought of as long dead and distant, linked through a line of collectors who seemingly handed off the baton to one another. More than one of my mentors and the experts who I regularly consult in preparing my book manuscript worked with Schultes, regaling me with stories of his outsized personality over drinks. My close friend, a collections manager at a botanical garden, texted me this morning to say that she was at work digitizing his material. Writing the history of ethnobotany must include acknowledgements of and challenges to the inextricability of the field from colonial violence and extraction, even in attempts to tell stories that include voices beyond these few prominent men. Returning to my book project as the research-filled days of summer dwindle, I look at a specimen of liverwort collected by Spruce from Ecuador, housed at the New York Botanical Garden, alongside one of Schultes’s field notebooks, digitized by Harvard, and consider myself as an entangled part of this legacy, choosing my words carefully.