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the reader most ignorant of botany to go through that book from one end to the other.” The Week acknowledged Catharine as “an authority upon the flora of this country” and praised her for her “simplicity of style.” The Marquis of Lorne, who had been Governor-General of Canada from 1878 to 1883, and to whom the book was dedicated, told Agnes Chamberlin that Catharine’s work “will add a great deal to our pleasure in discerning the different species.” And Professor Fletcher wrote her: “With regard to your disclaiming the title of botanist, all I can say is, I wish a fraction of one percent of the students of plants who call themselves botanists, could use their eyes half as well as you have done. I think indeed your work of describing all the wild plants, in your book, so accurately that each one could have the name applied to it without doubt, is one of the greatest botanical triumphs which anyone could achieve, and one which I have frequently spoken of to illustrate how one can develop their powers of observation.”

Catharine knew how she wanted her “little work,” as she called it, to be regarded. She opened with a verse from Sir Walter Scott, and she addressed her “dear reader.” In the introduction, she stated that she hoped the book might become “a household book, as Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne is to this day among English readers.” White’s eighteenth-century classic was an anachronism to muscular post-Darwinian botanists at the turn of the nineteenth century. Yet Catharine always understood the book’s gentle appeal, based on literary as well as scientific merit. Had Studies of Plant Life in Canada been received as a literary rather than a scientific text, it might have been seen alongside works by contemporaries who shared her concerns. Catharine Parr Traill would have been comfortable in the company of the nineteenth-century American poet Walt Whitman, who wrote, “A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books,” or the Russian writer Anton Chekhov who, in Uncle Vanya, bemoaned the fact that, “Whole Russian forests are going under the axe. …We’re losing the most wonderful scenery for ever, and why?” Studies of Plant Life in Canada, however, was assessed not as a literary work but alongside straightforward field-guides. It had a short shelf-life: it was reprinted in 1906, then virtually forgotten.

In the short term, Catharine’s age alone gave Plant Life a novelty value that led to sales. Most octogenarian authors would have regarded this triumph as their last hurrah and retired to rest on their laurels. But Catharine couldn’t. Her impulse to tell the next generation of Canadians about the natural beauty around them remained unquenched.

Chapter 20

The Oldest Living Author in Her Majesty’s Dominion

C atharine was seated in her favourite rocking chair near the French windows of Westove’s parlour. From this vantage point, she could look out at the lilacs in her garden and watch the plump Canadian robins strutting about on the grass. On one side of her chair was a sewing basket, filled with brightly coloured scraps of fabric from which she was making a patchwork quilt for the Indian Missionary Auxiliary. On the other side was a knitting bag, in which was tucked a half-finished woollen hat for one of her grandsons. Today, however, Catharine was busy with the activity she most enjoyed of all her pursuits: writing. On her lap was a portable writing desk, with a fresh sheet of paper and an inkwell filled with thick black ink. Her steel-nibbed pen hovered over the page as her mind drifted back to her Suffolk childhood.

She was trying to capture in words the atmosphere of Reydon Hall in the early years of the century, when she and her five sisters were growing up there. In 1887, her sister Jane Margaret Strickland had published Life of Agnes Strickland. Jane’s book was an adulatory account of her sister’s biographical achievements, describing Agnes in glowing terms as a sort of literary Madonna: “We must remember that Agnes Strickland was really more of the woman than