This book is part of an extensive botany of the Caribbean compiled by the French botanist Michel Étienne Descourtilz. Descourtilz travelled to the West Indies in 1799, first visiting Cuba before arriving in the French colony of Saint Domingue (now Haiti) that April. He spent the next four years travelling the country, which was in the midst of the Haitian Revolution, working as a physician under the general and later Emperor of Haiti, Jean-Jacques Dessalines.

Descourtilz collected many of his specimens while on campaign between Port-au-Prince and Cap-Haïtien and returned to France in 1803, where he published this work. It was beautifully illustrated by his son and fellow naturalist, Jean-Theodore Descourtilz, who would later undertake an expedition to Brazil.