Botanical Companions: A Memoir of Plants and Place (American Land & Life)

An experimental study of the creation and preservation of botanical knowledge follows the lives of two prominent Rocky Mountain botanists. In her luminous inquiry into the intricate connections among work, place, and people, Frieda Knobloch explores the lives of two Rocky Mountain botanists, Aven Nelson (1859-1952) and Ruth Ashton Nelson (1896-1987). Aven was a professor of botany at the University of Wyoming for many years; Ruth compiled field guides to Rocky Mountain plants and wrote articles on botany for magazines. The two met and married when Aven was in his seventies and Ruth was in her mid thirties, and they developed a symbiotic partnership that joined work and play, learning and companionship. Into this relatively straightforward reconstruction of two lives Knobloch blends the history of her own life as a scholar and an amateur naturalist, her own journal entries, and her letters written to Ruth to create a transformative environmental auto/biography. Annotation "In her inquiry into the intricate connections among work, place, and people, Frieda Knobloch explores the lives of two Rocky Mountain botanists, Aven Nelson (1859-1952) and Ruth Ashton Nelson (1896-1987)." "Botanical Companions is a reworking of academic genres that will intrigue readers interested in environmental history, ecocriticism, cultural studies, American studies, and the natural history of the Rocky Mountain West."--BOOK JACKET. Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved Contents Foreword by Wayne Franklin Preface and Acknowledgments Work in Place Specimens Album Letters Habeas Corpus Collecting Red Desert Reprise Notes Bibliography By Frieda E. Knobloch ; Foreword By Wayne Franklin. Includes Bibliographical References (p. [177]-182).