Résumés
Abstract
Four women from the British colonial elite in Quebec and Newfoundland were among the more than 120 contributors to William Jackson Hooker’s Flora Boreali-Americana (1829-40), an imperial project to assemble information about plants from across British North America. Letters that Christian Ramsay (Lady Dalhousie), Anne Mary Perceval, Harriet Sheppard, and Mary Brenton wrote to Hooker during the 1820s and 1830s show their interest in collecting Canadian plants — native orchids, ferns, weeds, bog plants — as well as their zeal for sharing knowledge and communicating their findings among friends and across borders. Along with other archival materials now available, the letters are a record of work by women in botanical discovery. By making visible the friendships, networks, and social and cultural practices that brought the women into Hooker’s project, the letters enlarge and enrich the history of science in Canada.
Keywords:
- Botany,
- women,
- correspondence,
- networks,
- British North America,
- William Jackson Hooker,
- Lady Dalhousie,
- Anne Mary Perceval,
- Harriet Sheppard,
- Mary Brenton,
- Quebec,
- Newfoundland
Résumé
Parmi plus de 120 collaborateurs au projet de Flora Boreali-Americana (1829-1840) du botaniste William Jackson Hooker figurent quatre femmes de l’élite coloniale britannique de Québec et de Terre-Neuve, collaboratrices au projet de flore de l’Amérique du Nord britannique. La correspondance de Christian Ramsay (Lady Dalhousie), Anne Mary Perceval, Harriet Sheppard et Mary Brenton avec Hooker durant les années 1820 et 1830, illustre bien leur intérêt à récolter des plantes du Canada — orchidées indigènes, fougères et plantes introduites et de tourbières — et leur zèle à transmettre leurs connaissances et leurs trouvailles à leurs amis et au-delà des frontières. Ces lettres, combinées aux autres documents d’archives maintenant disponibles, témoignent de la contribution de ces femmes à la découverte botanique. Tout en révélant les amitiés, les réseaux et les pratiques sociales et culturelles de ces femmes au projet de Hooker, cette correspondance unique élargit et enrichit l’histoire des sciences au Canada.
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Biographical notes
Ann Shteir, professor emerita in York University’s School of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, is the author of Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England 1760 to 1860 and co-editor of books about women in the cultural history of nature and science. In October 2017 she directed a SSHRC Connection Grant workshop on “Women, Men, and Plants in 19th-Century Canada: New Resources, New Perspectives” and is now preparing the papers for publication.
Jacques Cayouette is a botanist at the Ottawa Research and Development Centre, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, and curator of the Vascular Plant Herbarium (DAO) at the same institution. He is author of À la Découverte du Nord: deux siècles et demi d’exploration de la flore nordique du Québec et du Labrador (Québec, Éditions MultiMondes, 2014). He also co-authored Audubon: Beyond birds. Plant Portraits and Conservation Heritage of John James Audubon with Ernie Small, Paul M. Catling and Brenda Brookes (Ottawa, NRC Press, 2009) and Curieuses histoires de plantes du Canada, with Alain Asselin and Jacques Mathieu (Québec, les éditions du Septentrion, tome 1, 2014; tome 2, 2015; tome 3, 2017).