Plants and Flowers of Maine

4.5 stars for the e-version
(I expect the print version to be a clear 5 star)

Catherine “Kate” Furbish (1834-1931) kept meticulous records of her botanical findings from the state of Maine, her goal was to complete as comprehensive a collection as possible of all of the flora of Maine, a rather significant goal.

Born in Exeter, New Hampshire, about twenty miles from the border of Maine, her family moved when she was a year old to Brunswick, Maine. She would live there for the rest of her life, thirty-five of those years she lived with her parents in the house her father built in 1838, on a lovely, tree-lined street with all the charm of New England towns. As a young girl attending a private school for girls, she studied Latin, and was most likely introduced to botany in this environment where “this delightful science has become at the present time a favorite with the young, refined, and delicate of our sex...” (Margaret Coxe “Conversations on the Botany of the Scriptures”). She was also trained from her early years in drawing and art.

Initially collecting many plants around her home town, including wildflowers, spring blooming trees, while using reference manuals including Professor Asa Gray, M.D. ”How Plants Grow: A Simple Introduction to Structural Botany with a Popular Flora.” Her collection was amassed over years.

To give you a timeline reference, there is a lapse in her botanical “collectings” that is most likely attributed to the onset of the Civil War.

In 1908, when she was seventy-four, she began organizing her herbarium collection which consisted of nearly 4,000 sheets, with the aid of one younger assistant. These went to the New England Botanical Club, however her collection of watercolor illustrations stayed in Maine, gifted to Bowdoin College for the future instruction of botanists.

Her illustrations are incredibly lovely, intricately detailed, and are very unique in how they are illustrated.

I recommend this for anyone who wants a glimpse of nature, a glimpse of a life in another time, and for anyone who can appreciate nature as art.

Pub Date: 1 September 2016

Many thanks to Rowman & Littlefield, NetGalley for providing me with an advanced copy for reading and review.

In the late 19th and early twentieth century, Kate Furbish was not stitching samplers or keeping the homes fire burning, she was tromping across Maine, identifying, labeling and classifying plants, a few that were completely unknown and were subsequently named after her. Her work was her passion and she spent 60 years in the field, not only identifying the flora, but painting and drawing it as well. Her original illustrations are kept at the Bowdoin College Library, but any Maine school child would recognize her artwork. Growing up in Maine, my teachers and librarians were eager to share books with Furbish’s gorgeous artwork. Now, over 1,200 of her paintings have been gathered together in this book so that a new generation will have the privilege of sharing this remarkable woman’s vison