Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [141]
Had Catharine been born a hundred years later, she would have become a serious scientist. But stuck in remote Douro Township, or on the Rice Lake Plains, Catharine had as much hope of mingling with professors of botany, who could tell her exactly how to mount and label her specimens, as she had of mingling with important authors in the London publishing business. She was so poor that she was never able to afford to visit the greatest natural wonder of her adopted land, Niagara Falls. She couldn’t even do accurate plant drawings; unlike Susanna, she had never mastered the art of flower-painting. She was an avid collector, and her “herbarium,” or collection of dried specimens, was one of her greatest sources of pleasure. Album after album was filled with elaborate arrangements of dried material.
Today, Catharine’s scrapbooks are lodged safely in the archives of the Museum of Nature in Ottawa. Their decaying pages, with their fragile red lichens still adhering to the rag paper and the blossoms of fireweed still purple 130 years after they were picked, give us a warm insight into their creator’s mind. The books bulge with lovingly handled plants, many of which she was the first to identify in the countryside around Lakefield. Specimens are arranged artistically on the page. One album begins with an inscription encircled by a wreath of pressed sphagnum moss and pearly-white everlastings. Another features sprays of pressed ferns, anchored on white birch bark and decorated with faded maple leaves. But vital scientific information—a plant’s Latin name, or the habitat and date on which it was found—is often missing. Catharine was as likely to accompany her specimens with biblical quotations (especially from the Psalms or Revelations) as with proper notation. Her albums include tiger moths, their delicate wings flaking with age, and the orange feathers of a northern oriole.
In the mid-nineteenth century, there was a market for Catharine’s type of collection and display. Friends bought her artistic arrangements of pressed flowers, just as they bought Susanna’s flower paintings, as aesthetic pleasures and keepsakes of their creator. Catherine sent the dried seeds of unusual plants to a professor of botany (probably Robert Graham, who held the chair from 1819 to 1845) at Edinburgh University. Provincial flower shows had special sections devoted to amateur herbariums: Catharine’s collection of dried native plants won a prize at the Kingston Provincial Fair in 1856, and in 1862 another collection was awarded second prize at the Provincial Exhibition in Toronto. Catharine knew her albums were well put together, and when her fern collection did not win a prize at the same show, she took umbrage: “They were without doubt the best things there of the kind … it has now become so partial a thing the awarding of the prizes that I shall make no further attempts to send any collection to the Provincial Shew.” When fire swept through Oaklands in 1857, instead of grabbing old letters, clothes or keepsakes, Catharine rescued from the crackling flames a half-finished manuscript on plants. Once she was settled at Westove, she decided to focus on her botanical interests as her next publishing project.
With some difficulty, Catharine managed to update her limited collection of botanical texts to include Maria Morris’s Wildflowers of Nova Scotia (published in 1840). She also got hold of a copy of the 1833 classic Flora Boreali Americana, by the illustrious Sir William Jackson Hooker, since 1840 director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Like Pursh’s, however, Hooker’s tome was written for professional scientists, not enthusiastic amateurs like Catharine. Catharine’s preferred model for botanical writing was The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne by the eighteenth-century naturalist Gilbert White, which had first appeared in 1789 and which she had read as a child. White, a country parson who lived in Hampshire, kept a careful record of the seasonal changes in his beloved birthplace.