Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [142]
The potential value of British North America’s plant life had been recognized as early as 1730, when company surgeons of the Hudson’s Bay Company began to include botanical descriptions and specimens of native plants in the regular reports that they sent back to London. During the eighteenth century, most specimens collected by explorer-naturalists were shipped straight to Kew Gardens in London. However, by the time the Strickland sisters arrived in British North America, a handful of the colony’s more affluent residents were showing some curiosity about the flora and fauna that surrounded them. Natural history societies had been established in Quebec, Montreal and Halifax during the 1820s. Toronto finally got its own Horticultural Society in 1834, and a botanical garden near Government House soon afterwards. The learned lectures and field expeditions offered by these societies were even considered suitable “scientific” activities for highbrow women—animal biology involved blood; mineralogy involved dirt; while horticulture involved only plants and flowers. The stylish Lady Dalhousie, wife of the Governor-in-Chief of British North America from 1820 to 1828, regularly swathed her head in muslin, to keep off the bugs, and set off with specimen box, magnifying glass and a retinue of attendants into the farmlands around Quebec City. Once her specimens were dried, university-educated members of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec (an organization founded by her husband) showed “M’lady” how to label them properly. Lady Dalhousie, whose articles appeared in the Society’s Transactions, was one of the few women of her time to be published alongside male botanists.
Catharine lacked the instruction that Lady Dalhousie enjoyed, but she had far more opportunity to concentrate on her botanical interests. From her earliest years in the bush, she would try to cultivate the plants she had found growing in the wild, or had seen Indian women using for their healing properties. She sold more than a dozen natural history articles to the Anglo-American Magazine, published in Toronto, and the Rochester-based Horticulturist. She was as maternal with plants as she was with her own children. She oohed and aahed over every discovery with protective pride, and in her published articles she used familiar and maternal metaphors alongside scientific terminology. When she could not discover an existing name for flowers and plants in the “wild woods,” she wrote soon after her arrival, “I consider myself free to become their floral godmother and give them names of my own choosing.” The longer she remained in the colony, however, the more she wondered whether progress towards permanent settlement was such a marvellous advance. So much was being lost as forest was cleared, roads constructed and towns founded.
Much of her concern for the wilderness was expressed in the dum-dedum of sentimental doggerel:
O wail for the forest, the proud stately forest,
No more its dark depths shall the hunter explore,
For the bright golden main
Shall wave free o’er the plain,
O wail for the forest, its glories are o’er.
But she also tried to alert others to the slow erosion of native Canadian species. In 1852, she protested to the editor of the Genesee Farmer that in the rush to clear land, stock greenhouses and cultivate annuals for gardens, indigenous forest plants were disappearing. “Man has altered the face of the soil,” she wrote with despair. “The mighty giants of the forest are gone, and the lowly shrub, the lovely flower, the ferns and mosses that flourished beneath their shade, have departed with them…. Where now are the lilies of the woods, the lovely and fragrant Pyrolas, the Blood-root, the delicate sweet scented Michella repens? Not on the newly cleared ground, where the forest once stood.”
Catharine’s first