Wealth & Money Quote by William Bartram

Bartram’s sentence performs a kind of gentle sleight of hand: it makes late December feel like an argument against winter itself. The line begins with the traveler’s posture of reverence - “contemplated this admirable grove” - which signals that the landscape isn’t backdrop but subject. “Contemplated” slows the pace, turning movement into attention, and attention into value. He’s not extracting resources or conquering territory; he’s rehearsing a different American relationship to land, one built on observation and wonder.

Then comes the quiet surprise: “though it was now late in December.” That concessive clause sets up a natural expectation (bare branches, dormancy) only to overturn it with “aromatic groves… in full bloom.” The effect is both sensory and ideological. “Aromatic” pulls the reader out of the visual and into the embodied; the environment is experienced through breath, not just sight. “Full bloom” in December isn’t just meteorology - it’s a claim about abundance, about the South’s ecological difference, about a continent that can still astonish Europeans and colonists alike.

Context matters: Bartram writes in the era when “nature writing” is becoming a tool of science, imperial cataloging, and national myth-making. His intent threads those needles. He inventories, yes, but he also aestheticizes, as if beauty could function as early conservation policy. Subtext: if a place can bloom when it “shouldn’t,” it deserves protection from the people who assume it exists to be cleared, planted, or priced.