Just Draw Botanicals presents a collection of 90 beautiful botanical images by contemporary artists from around the world. Dip-in for advice or flick through the pages for inspiration. Each image is accompanied by a short introduction, information on the approaches, techniques and tools used, and useful tips. Advice covers composition, colour, painting techniques and tips for working with plants. This is the perfect guide for artists and art lovers alike.

Applying ecocritical theory to the work of Victorian writers, this collection explores what a diversity of ecocritical approaches can offer students and scholars of Victorian literature, at the same time that it critiques the general effectiveness of ecocritical theory. Interdisciplinary in their approach, the essays take up questions related to the nonhuman, botany, landscape, evolutionary science, and religion. The contributors cast a wide net in terms of genre, analyzing novels, poetry, periodical works, botanical literature, life-writing, and essays. Focusing on a wide range of canonical and noncanonical writers, including Charles Dickens, the Brontes, John Ruskin, Christina Rossetti, Jane Webb Loudon, Anna Sewell, and Richard Jefferies, Victorian Writers and the Environment demonstrates the ways in which nineteenth-century authors engaged not only with humans’ interaction with the environment during the Victorian period, but also how some authors anticipated more recent attitudes toward the environment.

The author's aim in these essays, which complement his pioneering books on natural history, has been to find out more about the different categories of people who engaged in this field in the past, and to piece together how the subject has been shaped by changes in society as a whole. For long the historical study of natural history was neglected, being questionably science as historians of science chose to define that word; David Allen’s work has done much to remedy this. One group of the essays included here seeks to reinterpret and document more fully topics covered in The Naturalist in Britain; others look at crazes that swept society, notably the Victorian mania for fern collecting, and at the biographies of some of the leading naturalists in 18th- and 19th-century Britain.

In Literary/Liberal Entanglements, Corrinne Harol and Mark Simpson bring together ten essays by scholars from a wide range of fields in English studies in order to interrogate the complex, entangled relationship between the history of literature and the history of liberalism. The volume has three goals: to investigate important episodes in the entanglement of literary history and liberalism; to analyze the impact of this entanglement on the secular and democratic projects of modernity; and thereby to reassess the dynamics of our neoliberal present. The volume is organized into a series of paired essays, with each pair investigating a concept central to both literature and liberalism: acting, socializing, discriminating, recounting, and culturing. Collectively, the essays demonstrate the vivid capacity of literary study writ large to reckon with, imagine, and materialize durative accounts of history and politics. Literary/Liberal Entanglements models a method of literary history for the twenty-first century.

Applying ecocritical theory to the work of Victorian writers, this collection explores what a diversity of ecocritical approaches can offer students and scholars of Victorian literature, at the same time that it critiques the general effectiveness of ecocritical theory. Interdisciplinary in their approach, the essays take up questions related to the nonhuman, botany, landscape, evolutionary science, and religion. The contributors cast a wide net in terms of genre, analyzing novels, poetry, periodical works, botanical literature, life-writing, and essays. Focusing on a wide range of canonical and noncanonical writers, including Charles Dickens, the Brontes, John Ruskin, Christina Rossetti, Jane Webb Loudon, Anna Sewell, and Richard Jefferies, Victorian Writers and the Environment demonstrates the ways in which nineteenth-century authors engaged not only with humans’ interaction with the environment during the Victorian period, but also how some authors anticipated more recent attitudes toward the environment.

When Catharine Parr Traill came to Upper Canada in 1832 as a settler from England, she brought along with her ties to British botanical culture. Nonetheless, when she arrived she encountered a new natural landscape and, like other women chronicled in this book, set out to advance the botanical knowledge of the time from the Canadian field. Flora’s Fieldworkers employs biography, botanical data, herbaria specimens, archival sources, letters, institutional records, book history, and abundant artwork to reconstruct the ways in which women studied and understood plants in the nineteenth century. It features figures ranging from elite women involved in imperial botanical projects in British North America to settler-colonial women in Ontario and Australia – most of whom were scarcely visible in the historical record – who were active in “plant work” as collectors, writers, artists, craft workers, teachers, and organizers. Understood as an appropriate pastime for genteel ladies, botany offered women pathways to scientific education, financial autonomy, and self-expression. The call for more diverse voices in the present must look to the past as well. Bringing botany to historians and historians to botany, Flora’s Fieldworkers gathers compelling material about women in colonial and imperial Canada and Australia to take a new look at how we came to know what we know about plants.