The hamḍ arrived to Beirut by mail from Haifa, sent by a Mrs. Lily Ashley at the US consulate there. It was accompanied by a note from Lily, explaining that “I do not send the enclosed [hamḍ] as being “correct” but to let you see that I had not forgotten only found the irb [sic] more difficult than I had anticipated!!!” A debate ensued via post about the Arabic name for the plant, al-hamd—was this the plant's true name, or the name of the place it had been found? If the former, was it a “native” species or one that occupied other geographies as well? If the latter, what exactly was the relationship between plants and the lands upon which they grew? The hamd was only one of many samples that Beirut-based American missionary George Post received from his network of amateur botanists and collectors across the Levant. Post had come to Syria to be a doctor. He taught the dreaded course on Materia Medica at the Syrian Protestant College in the 1870s and 80s, but his passion for plants extended far beyond the medicinal. He spent vacations traveling around the region collecting samples for his herbarium (est. 1867) and “discovering” new species, whose novelty was often contested by other botanists. In the 1890s, Post published accounts of his voyages, recounting his journeys and the locations of his samples. In 1883, he published the Florae Orientalis, a huge manuscript with original illustrations detailing many thousands of species he “discovered” in the region. This paper unpacks the history of Post’s botanical explorations and the actors—both human and vegetal—his accounts brought to light, and hid from view. Encounters with Syrians dot Post’s stories of his search for rare plant species across the Eastern Mediterranean. This paper analyzes Post’s archive, correspondence, and publications to answer two key questions. First, how did Post work to localize the plants he encountered in the Eastern Mediterranean, rewriting the genre of biblical geography in the new, contested terms of Linnean botany, which fell apart when he encountered uncertain beings like the hamd? Second, what can Post’s accounts of his botanical travels tell us about relationships between people and the land in the late Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean? Even if Post himself considered living people at the margins of his investigations, in other words, what did he record despite himself?