Newly discovered records show that Middleton Place imported water buffalo from Constantinople in the late 18th century, the first in the United States. They were experimental draft animals, suited to the deep muck in which rice was grown. In the gardens, Arthur's son Henry Middleton's friendship with French botanist André Michaux resulted in the first camellias grown in an American garden, a house gift during Michaux's visit in 1786. Three of the four planted at the corners of the main parterre survive, grown to fifteen feet: One is "Camellia japonica" "reine des fleurs"; the other is an ancestor of the modern cultivar Charles Sprague Sargent. The second Henry Middleton expanded and enriched the gardens, introducing the garden's first Asiatic azalea ("Rhododendron indica"), and the crape myrtle ( "Lagerstroemia indica"), one of the oldest in America. He also filled greenhouses with exotics and imported plants and seeds to give antebellum Middleton Place something of the air of a botanical garden.