Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [140]
Kate Traill, Catharine’s eldest daughter, who devoted her life to her mother’s welfare.
However, Catharine was far from a merry widow—she still needed to earn money. The first entry in her journal for 1863 begins: “On examining the state of my purse I find just $4.30. This is all the funds I have to begin the year with. It is true that I have half a barrel of flour, and some meat and I have often been without meat and money. God will provide as heretofore.”
Catharine had known from childhood that God only helps those who help themselves; and for her that meant writing. Over the past thirty-five years she had worked in a variety of genres—children’s stories, romances, sketches of nature and autobiographical narratives. Although none of her books had made her a fortune, they sold well and had established her reputation in both Britain and Canada. She continued to churn out stories for educational and children’s magazines, and she knew which subjects were the perennial favourites of European readers, then and now —“Snow, ice storms, forest scenery … a flight of snowbirds would make a pretty little poem.” But her submissions were returned with demoralizing frequency, and with advancing age, she had less tolerance for hustling unsympathetic publishers or pleasing periodical editors. Like Susanna, she felt out of touch with the tastes of the main audience for her publications: the British. Her attention was increasingly focussed on the world at her own doorstep, within British North America—in particular, the natural world.
Ever since she had crossed the Atlantic, Catharine had collected and studied flowers, grasses, mosses, lichens and ferns. Nature study was a relief “from the home-longings that always arise in the heart of the exile, especially when the sweet opening days of Spring recall to the memory of the immigrant Canadian settler old familiar scenes …when all the gay embroidery of English meads and hedgerows put on their bright array.” Nature, for Catharine, was pervaded with divine purpose—its beauty and harmony illustrated God’s power and goodness. She never found a plant that she couldn’t love both for its looks and as an example of God’s creation. The bud of the water-lily, lying just below the surface, “is ready to emerge from its watery prison and in all its virgin beauty expand its snowy bosom to the sun and genial air,” she observed in a letter home in her first months in Upper Canada. Every year, she watched the changing seasons with a delight that always crept into whatever book she was writing at the time. “The pines were now putting on their rich, mossy, green spring dresses,” reads a passage in her Canadian Crusoes. “The skies were deep blue; nature, weary of her long state of inaction, seemed waking into life and light.” In The Female Emigrant’s Guide, she provided a month-by-month description of natural events, which covers everything from croaking frogs to wildflowers. In August, “the squirrels are busy from morning till night, gleaning the ripe grain … they seem to me the happiest of all God’s creatures, and the prettiest.”
But Catharine’s nature study wasn’t all Wordsworthian reverie and nostalgia for Suffolk’s daisies, bluebells and buttercups. She took a serious interest in every aspect of a plant: its appearance, its life cycle, its medicinal and food value, its relation to other plants. During her first decade in the silent and unexplored backwoods, she searched for the name of any unfamiliar species in the only botanical text she could lay her hands on: Frederick Pursh’s Flora Americae septentrionalis (North American Flora), published in 1814, which Frances Stewart had lent her. Since Catharine had never studied Latin, she stumbled through Pursh’s descriptions, “and when I came to a standstill I had recourse to my husband.” She copied Pursh’s use of the Linnean classification system of plant species, largely based on the number of stamens and pistils in the flower. Her husband’s books were lumpy with all the pressed specimens she had inserted