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By Root 1225 0

Daumier. By Agnes’s time, it was well-known in the United States through the colourful scenes of horses, yachts and newsworthy events published by Currier and Ives. But it had only reached Upper Canada in the 1830s, and was used there exclusively for maps, charts, cheques and banknotes. The colony’s artists considered the quality of local lithography far too poor for illustrations; Cornelius Krieghoff ’s Scenes in Canada were sent back to Munich to be lithographed. Agnes did enough research to convince herself that it was the perfect medium for her drawings because hundreds of illustrations could be taken from one stone. However, no Toronto printer could undertake the production of such sophisticated designs, so she decided that “if no one else could, I must endeavour to do it myself.”

She acquired a specially prepared block of limestone from a printer called Ellis and drew a trillium on it. Under Ellis’s guidance, she etched around the lines with chemicals, then greased the plate, rolled ink over the design, and pressed a damp sheet of paper onto the stone. A perfect reproduction of the trillium appeared on the paper. Fired up by success, Agnes drew the first of her own exquisite floral designs onto the stone and printed out five hundred plates. Then she cleaned off the first design and repeated the operation with the second design for five hundred copies. She worked on methodically, reusing the same stone each time, until she had five hundred copies of each of her ten designs.

Both Agnes’s aunt and her mother were in awe of Agnes’s achievement. Catharine recognized that this was “a gigantic effort to be executed by one person”—especially when the person was a single parent with a limited budget. Susanna, ever the pessimist, felt that her daughter had taken on far too much. She wrote to Catharine that if Agnes tried to paint all the plates herself, “it will well nigh kill her … I much fear either of you embarking in such a hazardous enterprise which if it did not succeed would be utter ruin.” But Agnes ignored the Cassandra chorus. She and her three eldest daughters—Maime (then sixteen), Cherrie (thirteen) and Alice (ten)—sat down at the dining-room table of their house on Dundas Street and coloured the whole edition of five thousand illustrations by hand. Some of the illustrations featured a single plant, such as Sarracenia purpurea, or purple pitcher plant. Others showed an unrelated group of three or four flowers, such as Veronica americana (American brooklime or speedwell), Rubus odoratus (purple-flowering raspberry), Moneses unifloea (one-flowered pyrola) and Pyrola elliptica (shin leaf). Had the book been published in England, with a professional lithographer and artist preparing the illustrations, she later discovered, the cost would have been 1,500 pounds ($7,500).

It did not take Catharine long to assemble from her plant life manuscript the brief literary descriptions to accompany Agnes’s lithographs. Each mini-essay (thirty-one altogether) was vintage Traill, combining a detailed description of the plant, its medicinal qualities, references to previous botanists’ writings about it, a smattering of poetry and Catharine’s personal opinion of its merits. She included the English, scientific and native names for each plant. And some of the information has a modern ring: for example, she described the medicinal qualities of coneflower, commonly known today by its Latin name, Echinacea. She mentioned that wintergreen could cure rheumatism, balsam made a good dye, and Indian herbalists used turnips as a remedy for colic. Of the species Pyrolae (wintergreen), she wrote an admiring description that is a botanic variation of something Agnes Strickland might have said about a particularly good-looking branch of the British aristocracy: “Every member of this interesting family is worthy of special notice. Elegant in form and colouring, they add to their many attractions the merit of being almost the first green thing to refresh the eye, long wearied by gazing on the dazzling snow for many consecutive months of winter.