Flora's Interpreters : Popular Botany in Nineteenth-Century America

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.