Flora's Interpreters

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 Fores