This book examines the ways in which Victorian flora and garden culture and the amateur botany movement influenced and circumscribed American feminine poetics from the late Transcendental period to the early Modern period. Delineating an ecofeminist tradition, as well as a variety of other theoretical sources, including human and feminist geography, the author interrogates the ways in which women, plants, botanical study, and feminine poetics were “othered” and delegitimized during the nineteenth century and beyond.

Molly Kugel is Instructor of English at University of Colorado Denver.