Mrs. Traill’s Books for Collectors

CANADIAN COLLECTOR
May/June 1978
Vol. 13/No. 3
Flowers to heal and comfort:
Mrs. Traill’s Books for Collectors
Elizabeth Collard

[Elizabeth Collard is an authority on 19th century Canadian social history and decorative arts. She has lectured at the symposia organized by the CANADIAN COLLECTOR and the Macdonald Stewart Foundation, and acts as a consultant to several Canadian museums.]

"Let Nature be your teacher," said Wordsworth; and Catharine Parr Traill (Fig. 1), Canada's celebrated botanist of the backwoods, fulfilled Wordsworth's urging to the letter. She had to. Nature was virtually all she had as an instructor. Thrust into an unfamiliar land when she was already past 30, completely untrained as a botanist, cut off from libraries, scarcely able to read the one botanical work she did borrow (it was mainly in Latin and she read Latin only through a slight knowledge of Italian), burdened by all the unrelenting hardships of pioneer life, not one of which spared her (she experienced cholera, fire, poverty, the death of children, widowhood), Mrs. Traill not only achieved a place among recognized botanists, she made original contributions to that science.

A reviewer in Saturday Night, summing up Mrs. Traill's career when she was in her nineties (and still writing), described her achievements as. "an unprecedented performance" , possible only because of the' 'mental inexhaustibility" of this "observant ... affectionate naturalist".(1 ) The Canadian Magazine pinpointed what would be Mrs. Traill's enduring claim to fame: it would rest on her "extensive and important researches in Canadian wild flowers", on work that was "botanical ... useful rather than ornamental" .(2) To produce useful botanical work was a triumph for one who had first turned to botany simply as a solace in her loneliness and a practical aid in her isolation.

Mrs. Traill was born in England in 1802, one of the clever, literary daughters of Thomas Strickland (a sister was Susanna Moodie, who wrote Roughing It in the Bush). Much of her childhood was spent among the amenities of Reydon Hall in Suffolk (Fig. 2), a far cry from the log cabin in primeval forest (Fig. 3) that became her Canadian home in 1832. By her own admission, she had thought botany "dry" when she was a girl, though she had always had a "passion for flowers".(3) She had given botany no attention until she found herself in the backwoods of Canada.

Even before Catharine and Thomas Traill (a Scottish half-pay officer) arrived in Douro Township, Mrs. Traill had begun her lively interest in the wild flowers of the new land. It was a foretaste of things to come when, on the way up to the Otonabee, she stopped to pick a cardinal flower. Only shortly before she had seen it growing as a cultivated rarity in English gardens; now "here it was in all its loveliness on the banks of a lonely forest stream . . . growing uncared for, unsought for and unvalued".(4) Half a century later she would be describing it botanically in her Studies of Plant Life in Canada.

A poor Irish immigrant transplanted to the Upper Canadian wilderness remarked to Mrs. Traill dolefully that the woods, where "there isn't a hap'orth worth the looking at", were a sad, lonesome place for womenfolk.(5) But for Mrs. Traill there proved to be more to look at than she could take in. Almost at once she became conscious of two facts: she wanted to know more about the wild flowers and shrubs that she found growing at her very door; and, quite as important, she needed to know more about them. As an antidote to loneliness, a study of these flowers would be an absorbing occupation; as an aid in combating the difficulties of day-to-day living, isolated from grocery supply centres and medical help, the edible and medicinal value of wild plants would be an essential knowledge.

Catharine Parr Traill plunged into the study of Canadian flora. Her research assistants were Indians and lumbermen. The Indians named her "Red Cloud of the Dawn", because of her rosy English complexion, and told her the Indian names of plants, instructing her in their use. The "choppers", learning of her delight in them, brought her any strange plant they found. She struggled for scientific information with her borrowed copy of Frederick Pursh's Florae Americae Septentrionalis. Soon she was weaving practical botanical information into the stories and emigrant guidebooks that were bringing her in needed money. She advised, for example, the use of wild spinach ("Lamb's-quarter") as a vegetable, but she cautioned that no unfamiliar plant should ever be eaten "unless you have full assurance of its being wholesome and that no mistake has been made about it" .(8)

From her own cruelly won experience she was able to comment on the medicinal use of plants. She lost two infants from dysentery before a Yankee settler's wife told her that the scraped and boiled (with a little milk) root of spikenard would cure it. “I have seen children ... restored, after taking three or four doses," she wrote. (7)

Year after year the careful gathering of Mrs. Traill's botanical notes went on. "By slow steps," she said, "I gleaned my plant lore."(8) And then she lost everything by fire. In 1857 the house and all its contents burned to the ground. Her husband never quite recovered from the shock. He died not long afterwards. Mrs. Traill began again, striving to recapture the botanical accuracy her notes had contained. In 1863 she took a manuscript to a Toronto publisher. This, she hoped, would be her monument, her botanical work. The book was turned down. There were no illustrations, and without illustrations such a work would not sell.

It was at this point that Mrs. Traill's niece, Mrs. Agnes FitzGibbon (Susanna's daughter), became the illustrator of her aunt's work. In 1865 she, too, was left a widow with children to support. She "had never painted a flower" but now, self-taught in her turn, she learned, working, as her aunt had done, from Nature.(9) Her grandson, C. G. Dunn of Quebec, recalled in the 1950's that his grandmother (Fig; 4) told him "how she and her aunt used to go into the woods and she would draw and paint the flowers and take them back home to complete them, and then old Mrs. Traill would write the names, etc."(10)

In this way aunt and niece collaborated on what was to be the first botanical book written, illustrated, and published in Canada.(11) An early, if not indeed the first, public reference to this important work is to be found in the old files of the Kingston Daily News. Mrs. FitzGibbon entered some of her flower studies in the provincial exhibition held in Kingston in 1867. The Daily News commented: "This lady appears to be enthusiastic on Canadian wild flowers, and intends, if sufficiently encouraged, to publish a book upon the subject, assisted by Mrs. Traill ... who undertakes the botanical descriptions."(12)

It was Agnes FitzGibbon, the illustrator, who forced Canadian Wild Flowers into print. In Toronto she was told that the necessary lithographic work could not be done in Canada. She had neither the money nor the inclination to have the work done anywhere else. She, therefore, did it herself. She had learned how to draw and paint the flowers on paper; she now learned how to draw them on lithographic stone. The next step was to get a publisher. Mrs. FitzGibbon pressed friends, acquaintances, and even merchants with whom she did business into becoming subscribers. With 500 signed-up subscribers, she persuaded John Lovell of Montreal to be the publisher. It is usually stated that she, unaided, coloured by hand all the plates for the first edition; she herself has said that this part of the work was accomplished "with the help of two or three young friends".

A number of Canadian reference books state that 1869 was the first publication date of Canadian Wild Flowers, but though rare, copies do exist with 1868 on the title page. In all there were four editions: 1868, 1869, 1870, 1895. Any edition now sells for what would have been riches to either of the widows. At the moment, the price range for the edition that turns up most often, that of 1869, (Fig. 5) is $400-$650. The rarest edition (1870) comes on the market so seldom that no price for it could be established. It is not in a number of the more important public collections and at least two of the specialist booksellers I consulted had never seen a copy.

This rarest of all the editions (Fig. 6) is the one that abandoned the name Canadian Wild Flowers and went after the American market. No date is on the title page but the date may be worked out from the preface. In the preface the collaborators say that since the flowers depicted also grow south of the border, they decided to alter the title to North American Wild Flowers to fit either Canada or the United States, "not wishing to put asunder those whom the Great Creator has united in one harmonious whole". (The reference was, of course, to the flowers and. not to the political divisions of the two countries.)

Each edition has ten coloured plates and a coloured title page showing groups of flowers ranging from the glorious pond lilies (Figs. 7, 8) (whose "fresh leaves are used as good dressing for blisters") to humble adder's-tongue (Fig. 9), and from the glow of the orange lily to lady's slipper (Fig. 10), appropriately known in Canada as moccasin flower. Because in every edition the plates were hand-coloured, there are variations. Checking the variations is one of the delights of the collector. A notable difference between the first and subsequent editions is in the illustration of the pitcher plant. Mrs. FitzGibbon explained that when it was too late to alter the illustration she realized the pitcher plant as she had drawn it was not in flower. "If our book reaches a second edition, this mistake will be rectified." It was, and later editions show the pitcher plant as it looks in blossom (Fig. II).

The Canadian Naturalist accorded Mrs. Traill high praise for her share in Canadian Wild Flowers. "Excellent" was the reviewer's comment on her choice of English names. He reserved his adverse criticism for John Lovell's part in the undertaking: "The plates are on poor paper, and the text needs the supervision of a proofreader.(13)

The Naturalist mentioned that Mrs. Traill had a larger manuscript on hand. It was this book, brought out in Ottawa in 1885 under the title Studies of Plant Life in Canada, that is her greatest work. This time the illustrations were chromolithographs by Mrs. Brown Chamberlin. (Agnes FitzGibbon had married Brown Chamberlin, the Queen's Printer, in 1870.) Studies of Plant Life was no "parlor table" book, as the Naturalist had termed Canadian Wild Flowers. It was a work of solid, extensive scholarship, revealing, as Professor Needler has said, "studies ... carried on with such thoroughness as to give her a place among scientific botanists".(14)

Mrs. Traill made no claims to erudition. Her object in all her nature writing was to help "other lonely hearts to enjoy the same pleasant recreation" that had helped her in the backwoods.(15) She put her material into plain language, writing for the ordinary person rather than the scholar; but scholars recognized the full measure of her achievement and praised her for the directness and clarity of her descriptions. In Studies of Plant Life she dealt with a staggering total of over 260 native wild flowers, 75 flowering shrubs, some 60 forest trees, and more than 50 native ferns, including one named for her. It was a life's work splendidly recorded.

Ten years after its publication the Studies had become a rare book, sought after even then by collectors. Today it is a fortunate collector who can find a copy for anything close to $100. I have seen it listed within the last two years for as high as $200.

Mrs. Traill continued her interest in botany until the end of her days. In Pearls and Pebbles; or, Notes of an Old Naturalist, published in 1895, four years before her death, she was still reveling in the "varied beauties" of the Canadian woods, rejoicing in wild flowers and ferns and "the pure, sweet scent of the pines.(16)

1. Saturday Night (Toronto), Dec. 29, 1894.
2. Canadian Magazine (Toronto), vol. IV (Nov. I894-April 1895), p. 388.
3. [Catharine Parr Traill), The Backwoods of Canada: Being Letters

From the Wife of an Emigrant Officer, 4th edn. (London: 1839), p. 91.
4. Catharine Parr Traill, Studies of Plant Life in Canada (Ottawa: 1885),

p. 96.
5. Ibid. , p. 2.
6. Catharine Parr Traill, The Canadian Settler's Guide, reprint edn.

(Toronto: 1969), p. 49.
7. Ibid. , p. 207 ..
8. Catharine Parr Traill, Studies, p. 3.
9. In the introduction to the 4th edn. of Canadian Wild Flowers (Toronto:

1895), Mrs. FitzGibbon gives the story of the whole project from the

start.
10. C. G. Dunn to Edgar Andrew Collard, Sept. I, 1959.
11. Maria Morris, the Nova Scotia artist, had published the Wild Flowers

of Nova Scotia, but her work, issued in parts, was lithographed and published in

London.
12. Daily News (Kingston), Sept. 25, 1867.
13. Canadian Naturalist and Quarterly Journal of Science (Montreal),

new series, vol. IV (1869), p. 100.
14. G. H. Needler, "The Otonabee Trio of Women Naturalists", Canadian

Field-Naturalist, vol. LX (Sept.-Oct. 1946), p.98.
15. Catharine Parr Traill, Studies, p. 3.
16. Catharine Parr Traill, Pearls and Pebbles; or, Notes of an Old

Naturalist (Toronto; 1895), p. 174.

FOR FURTHER READING
The reader will find nature notes, mostly botanical, scattered throughout all Mrs. Traill's works. See in particular those referred to in the above article and footnotes. Pearls and Pebbles contains a biographical sketch written by a grandniece. In 1906 Studies of Plant Life was reissued in different format (even this edition now commands a price in the vicinity of $50). The Canadian Settler's Guide was reissued in paperback in 1969. Canadian Wild Flowers has also been reissued in card covers. Periodicals of Victorian days frequently contain articles by Mrs. Traill. An example is "A Glance Within the Forest", which appeared in The Canadian Monthly, vol. VI (1874).