My research examines the evolution of French conceptions of American flora in seventeenth and eighteenth-century New France and Louisiana as they were shaped by encounters with indigenous cultures and that increasingly diverged from metropolitan understandings of colonial environments. I argue that that, over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the French who traveled and settled in the Great Lakes region and along the Saint Lawrence and Mississippi rivers developed a complex body of knowledge about American flora as they lived in new environments and with the Native American cultures who mediated their experiences of them. Even as these colonial naturalists contributed to an increasingly centralized scientific culture within the French Atlantic World they continued to articulate both alternative scientific methods that included indigenous knowledges and broader visions of scientific community in the French Atlantic World that challenged the monopoly of Paris-based naturalists on scientific legitimacy and authority. My research ultimately argues for a reconceptualization of the nature of scientific activity in a multicultural, epistemologically diverse Atlantic world and recognition of the role of a culturally and epistemologically diverse cast of actors that have most often remained invisible in histories of early modern and enlightenment science.