The historiography of nineteenth-century botany is replete with the names of influential men. Women naturalists, for their part, were systematically denied resources, education and career opportunities. As Ann Shteir explains in her introduction to Flora’s Fieldworker, leading botanical men routinely disparaged their efforts as ‘mere collecting’ or ‘amusement for ladies’ (pp. 4, 6). Women nonetheless collected plants, wrote about them, or pursued botanical interests via other means. Contributors to the book discuss these activities under five headings.

The first, ‘Approaching Lady Dalhousie: new resources, new perspectives’, considers the botanical work of Christian Ramsay, who accompanied her husband, the Marquess of Dalhousie, in his governorships of Nova Scotia (1816–20) and British North America (1820–8). Wide reading and gardening experience afforded Lady Dalhousie the know-how to collect for William Jackson Hooker at Kew, enabling her to become one of only four women cited in his Flora Boreali-Americana (1829–40). Deborah Reid’s opening chapter relates how the marquess generally supported these endeavours, even as motherhood and official duties restrained her. The next essay, by Jacques Cayouette and Faye-Yin Khoo, scours herbarium sheets and other sources to illuminate Lady Dalhousie’s skill in identifying plants and the impressive geographical scope of her efforts. Despite these accomplishments, as Virginia Vandenberg’s chapter illustrates, Lady Dalhousie and other women naturalists frequently downplayed their expertise as mere ‘dabblers’ (p. 112).

The next section, ‘Collecting and its contexts’, opens with Shteir’s own chapter on Mary Brenton, who contributed to the Flora Boreali-Americana from Newfoundland. Driven by a self-declared ‘love for flowers’ rather than an abstractly ‘botanical’ interest, Brenton held what Shteir calls an ‘emotive’ rather than ‘scientific’ attachment to plants (p. 145). Sara Maroske’s chapter – the only non-Canada-focused entry – then turns to the collecting network centered on Ferdinand von Mueller, government botanist of Victoria, Australia. Defined in opposition to both Kew and First Nations knowledges, this work, which involved a large number of women and girls, fed into the development of a distinctive Australian settler identity. Alice Hollingworth, from a modest background in rural Muskoka, Ontario, forms the subject of James Pringle’s chapter. In addition to collecting and illustrating plants, Hollingworth advocated for various causes, including women’s education and suffrage.

Opening Part 3 on ‘Natural history “old” and “new”’ is Michael Peterman’s chapter on the botanical work of the famous writer Catherine Parr Traill. Although Traill faced prejudice in her time and since, such views say more about the gendered exclusions of late nineteenth-century science than about Traill’s abilities as a collector and observer, which culminated in her Canadian Wild Flowers (1868) and Studies of Plant Life in Canada (1885). Another woman who did not fit the increasingly specialized nature of nineteenth-century botany was Isabella McIntosh, a Montreal schoolteacher. As Karen Stanworth describes, this did not prevent McIntosh from collecting plants or teaching botany, a field she viewed as a ‘spirit stirring’ reflection on the works of divine creation (p. 249).

Part 4, ‘Seeing and making’, commences with a study of the Victoria-born flower artist Sophie Pemberton. Unfettered by formal scientific training, Pemberton embraced idiosyncratic plant realities rather than taxonomical abstractions in the flower albums she gifted to family members, which included poetry, scientific names and individualized plant illustrations. These albums, Kirstina Huneault suggests, were in part theoretical reflections on the tension between generic sameness and specific difference that pervaded botany and gender norms alike. Vanessa Nicholas’s chapter turns to the quilts produced by two Ontario women, Elizabeth Bell and Margaret McCrum. Although the quilts differ in their production – Bell’s 1840s quilt was a patchwork of natural-history illustrations, referencing early modern quilting practices; McCrum’s late nineteenth-century work drew inspiration from First Nations souvenir beadwork – both, Nicholas argues, engaged with plants and natural history on a more than merely ‘symbolic or ornamental’ level (p. 336).

Part 5, ‘Expanding public practices’, opens with David Galbraith’s survey of nineteenth-century Canadian botanic gardens. Women helped develop gardens in Montreal and Kingston, but their efforts were short-lived and marginal compared with their counterparts elsewhere in the British Empire. Horticulture and popular writing held greater promise for women, as Dawn R. Bazely and Kathryn McPherson argue. Plant experts like Agnes Fitzgibbon, writer and illustrator of Canadian Wild Flowers (1869), thereby became the ‘citizen scientists of their day’ (p. 394). Fitzgibbon is one of many women in Flora’s Fieldworkers who, as Suzanne Zeller’s afterword observes, found themselves demoted with the turn toward analytical plant sciences and laboratory experimentalism, but found other avenues for their work outside but adjacent to mainstream science.

These essays have much to offer newcomers and specialists alike in the history of botany, gender and science, and imperial and colonial history. They surely demonstrate the limitations of an ‘amateur’/’professional’ framework for comprehending the work of nineteenth-century women naturalists, given the extent to which they were systemically under-recognized and under-remunerated. To participate at all often required the intercession of influential men who were not thus inhibited. The book also shows how, in devaluing women, late nineteenth-century science also marginalized alternative world views that connected the study of plants to broader ecological, spiritual and political concerns.

The book’s pre-eminent accomplishment is the diversity of research approaches it showcases – from archival work and oral history to material-culture analysis of scrapbooks, albums, herbaria and even quilts. Some readers may wish for a fuller consideration of other disenfranchised cultures and knowledges – including Indigenous women’s knowledges – an injustice to which (as several authors observe) many settler women naturalists contributed. Others may also be deterred by the book’s cost. Provided that academic libraries are swift to acquire Flora’s Fieldworkers – and they should be – the omnivorous suite of methodologies displayed here holds promise for recuperating all manner of knowledges sidelined or silenced outright within the intertwined projects of masculine science, empire and settler nationalism.