My Thoughts:

I have not read this book front to back. However, ever since we got this book in November, I have kept picking it up to look through the art, the poems, and the facts for inspiration. It is truly a unique book you must see in person. My pick for National Poetry Month!

Summary of Book:

American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide collects poems, essays, and letters from the 1700s to the present that focus on wildflowers and their place in our culture and in the natural world. Editor Susan Barba has curated a selection of plants and texts that celebrate diversity: There are foreign-born writers writing about American plants and American writers on non-native plants. There are rural writers with deep regional knowledge and urban writers who are intimately acquainted with the nature in their neighborhoods. There are female writers, Black writers, gay writers, and indigenous writers. The book includes exquisite watercolors by Leanne Shapton throughout and is organized by species and botanical family–think of it as a field guide to the literary imagination.

Works of botanists:

 William Bartram, George Washington Carver, and Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Horticultural writers:

Neltje Blanchan and Eleanor Perényi.

Prose pieces:

Aldo Leopold, Lydia Davis, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil.

Poems:

Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, and T. S. Eliot to Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley, Lucille Clifton, Louise Glück, Natalie Diaz, and Jericho Brown.