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If there is no word for wilderness in French, how did early colonists, missionaries, and explorers experience the environments of northeastern North America to which they came in the seventeenth century? This article returns to the French term for the nature that they encountered—sauvage, or wild—to suggest that French colonialism actively sought out those places and plants that could be identified as wild. These were invariably the product of Europe and North America’s shared geologic and evolutionary histories, related species of common botanical genera and families. In the encounters between French colonists and the plants they called sauvage, we can glimpse the emergence of a French colonial political ecology that identified the observable differences between American and European flora as wildness. Focusing on the opportunities to rehabilitate sauvage fruits and landscapes, empire itself was recast …