Pierre-Paul Saunier

In 1785, Thouin selected him to accompany the explorer-botanist André Michaux (1746–1802) to North America where he was to assist in the establishment of a royal garden for the French crown.

[1] The Age of Discovery and Enlightenment from the 16th to 18th centuries resulted in European colonial expansion and the search for new commodities, including plant trophies and curiosities.

This enterprise was centred in the tropics, but by the 18th century the European desire for plants and seeds had extended to temperate North America.

[5] Pierre-Paul Saunier was born at Saint-Aubin-sur-Gaillon, Eure department in Normandy in northern France, and became an apprentice gardener at the Jardin du Roi in Paris.

Michaux was answerable to comte d'Angiviller (1730–1810) who had been appointed Director of the Jardin du Roi on the death of the famous naturalist Buffon (1707–1788).

By September 1786 he had selected a site for a second garden of 111 acres in Charleston, Carolina and here he stayed, with occasional visits to Saunier in New York, until departing for France in August 1796.

Saunier made no shipments of either seed or plants from 1792 to 1802, he did not communicate with the French government and his salary was stopped: the garden at Charleston was abandoned.

They had two sons, Michael (b.1794) and Abraham (b.1797) and two daughters, Angelick and Margaret Saunier made 5 land purchases to add to the garden.

In Volume One of the same work Bean notes that, at that time of his writing, some of the trees raised from the seed of Michaux's collections in America could still be seen in the gardens of Petit Trianon and Arboretum de Balaine.