ABSTRACT
Jane Loudon is both representative of this phenomenon and distinctive for her individual achievements. A self-supporting author of fi ction and miscellaneous works since age seventeen, she embarked on writing nonfi ction about gardens and plants after marrying the horticultural author-editor John Claudius Loudon (“Account” xl). When British Wild Flowers was fi rst published in 1844, Jane Loudon had recently brought out A First Book of Botany, Botany for Ladies, and several garden books, including three volumes of her ambitious multi-volume series The Ladies’ Flower-Garden (1840-1848). Prolifi c and successful, Loudon made her own way in a
botanical print market that, in Ann B. Shteir’s analysis, increasingly demarcated boundaries between “professionalizing” and “popularizing” agendas, between strictly scientifi c discourse about plants and the expressive, spiritual, and artistic writing that appealed to amateurs, especially women (153). British Wild Flowers offered a popular guide to wildfl ower identifi cation with a measure of scientifi c heft for readers interested in further study: organized taxonomically, it lists plants with Latin nomenclature and technical terms for their parts. At the same time, it ranges freely among non-factual discourses-fl oral folklore, mythology, and poetry-that were being discarded from modern scientifi c texts. British Wild Flowers distinguishes itself from most of Loudon’s other works with its full-page color illustrations, a feature captivating in its visual splendor, though regarded as problematic by some authors concerned about fostering scientifi c profi ciency, as we will see. Drawing on a breadth of human and cultural reference, British Wild Flowers integrates scientifi c and aesthetic, fact-based and subjective ways of knowing the world of plants. In doing so, it exudes the confi dence of an experienced woman writer operating skillfully in the contested fi eld of Victorian popular science.1
