Flora's Interpreters
Popular Botany in Nineteenth-Century America
Ann A. Merrill(Author)
University of Georgia Press
Will be published approx. on 15. September 2026
Book
Hardback
264 pages
978-0-8203-7463-5 (ISBN)
Description
Flora's Interpreters explores how everyday Americans in the nineteenth century interacted with common plants and recorded these relationships in diaries, books, and material artifacts. Through extensive archival research, Merrill uncovers genres not typically considered by scholars of environmental literature and history, including botany textbooks, herbaria, and flower language dictionaries. These genres shared a commitment to place-based knowledge, encouraging readers to discover, identify, and preserve the plants around them. Popular botany books also celebrated the diversity and abundance of American flora in detailed illustrations and lavish bindings. Beyond their printed contents are the inscriptions, marginalia, sketches, and pressed specimens that provide fascinating evidence of individual botanical encounters. A dialogic structure of genre surveys followed by "From the Archives" chapters highlight the interplay of general and particular that characterizes popular botany.
Combining approaches from environmental humanities, plant studies, material culture analysis, and history of the book, Merrill offers a unique perspective on sources relevant to nineteenth-century American environmentalism. Distinctive for its combination of visual, textual, and material analyses, Flora's Interpreters is beautifully illustrated with images from primary sources and will appeal to anyone interested in the significance of plants for early American conservation, citizen science, and creative expression.
Combining approaches from environmental humanities, plant studies, material culture analysis, and history of the book, Merrill offers a unique perspective on sources relevant to nineteenth-century American environmentalism. Distinctive for its combination of visual, textual, and material analyses, Flora's Interpreters is beautifully illustrated with images from primary sources and will appeal to anyone interested in the significance of plants for early American conservation, citizen science, and creative expression.
Reviews / Votes
Flora's Interpreters is an exhaustively researched, creatively structured, accessibly written, deeply engaging work of perceptive and original ecocritical scholarship that reintroduces readers to a fascinating and vitally important lost genre of American women's environmental writing. -- Michael P. Branch * author of On the Trail of the Jackalope and Reading the Roots * Exhaustively researched and exquisitely illustrated, Flora's Interpreters offers a comprehensive study of botany manuals, herbaria, and flower-language books, revealing the early roots of our contemporary wonder at the mysteries and marvels of plants. Through rescued archival treasures and perceptive analysis, Merrill demonstrates that what may appear to have been a frivolous pastime-the popular pursuit of flowers and their "meanings"-in fact nurtured early American alertness to local places and encouraged many positive pursuits: the development of aesthetic and moral sensibilities; the practice of civic engagement; activity and attentiveness in the outdoors; the furthering of scientific understanding; and even awareness of social injustice. -- Rochelle L. Johnson * author of Passions for Nature: Nineteenth-Century America's Aesthetics of Alienation, past president of the Association for the Study of Literature & Environment and of The Thoreau Society * Meticulously researched and ambitious in scope, Flora's Interpreters offers readers insight into historical, scientific, medicinal, political, emotional, and religious elements of American culture. Merrill illuminates how children and adults, women and men, working-class people and elites, and people of many races and ethnicities have engaged with the country's plants and flowers. Beautifully illustrated, this wonder-full book contributes generously to specialized conversations in such areas as critical plant studies as well as to environmental humanities more broadly. Merrill's accessible prose explores widely published and archival materials, reminding readers of the past while invoking an observant, engaged, and sustainable future. Reflecting twenty years of painstaking research, personal practice, and careful contemplation, Flora's Interpreters represents a major achievement. -- Karen L. Kilcup * author of Stronger, Truer, Bolder and Fallen Forests *More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Georgia
United States
Product notice
Paper over boards
Illustrations
183 color photographs, 54 B&W photographs
Dimensions
Height: 203 mm
Width: 203 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-8203-7463-5 (9780820374635)
Copyright in bibliographic data is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or its licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
ANN A. MERRILL is the Thomson Professor Emerita of Environmental Studies at Davidson College, where she taught in the English and Environmental Studies departments for thirty years. She is coeditor of Coming into Contact: Explorations in Ecocritical Theory and Practice (Georgia) with Ian Marshall, Daniel J. Philippon, and Adam Sweeting. An avid gardener and flower enthusiast, she is committed to raising awareness about the crucial importance of plants both historically and today. She lives in Portland, Oregon.