“The land underfoot shapes how we think.” In this introspective part botany journal/sketchbook and part memoir, Baldwin infuses her stunning ink and watercolour sketches of plants and landscapes with reflections on connecting with the land. Representing her “rhythm of a life lived alongside plants,” her writing also reveals how plants have helped her deal with her challenging childhood. Her poetic reflections are organized into chapters ranging from “Mapping Moss” and “Say the Names” to “Cultivating Troubled Soil” and “When Mountains Move.” She believes most biology students are “oblivious to the plant world” and can benefit from taking time to slow down and notice our environment. Also includes reflections on Indigenous connections to the land and explores plants and landscapes around the Okanagan region. Baldwin is a field botanist and award-winning Botany instructor at Thompson River University. Her illustrated field journal has been published in a variety of journals, science museums, and art galleries.

Other End Matter: Extensive footnotes, about the author
Images: Colour illustrations, b&w illustrations, Maps
Bibliography: Yes
Index: No

Source: Books BC - BC Books for Schools

Lyn Baldwin is an award-winning teacher and plant conservation biologist who uses art and science to help mitigate society’s extinction of experience with the botanical world. From her home in the sagebrush steppe and coniferous forest of the South Thompson Valley, Lyn teaches botany at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, BC. For more than two decades, she has worked to cultivate care between the people and plants of place by sharing the stories she discovers, in her illustrated field journal; in art galleries and science museums; and in the pages of publications such as The Goose, Camas, Hamilton Arts and Letters, The Fourth River, Terrain, and The Journal of Natural History Education and Experience.

Lyn Baldwin's profile page

“Drawing Botany Home is a beautiful account of a life’s accumulations, its narratives of paths and plants and family relationships. Lyn Baldwin pays careful attention to place and what it holds, in terms of both biota and memory, and from these sources she guides the reader through richly textured landscapes. Her writing is lyrical, her love of the intimate durability of the natural world infectious, and the pages from her field journals reproduced throughout the book reveal a perceptive and generous eye.” —Theresa Kishkan, author of Blue Portugal and Other Essays, The Weight of the Heart, Euclid’s Orchard, Winter Wren and numerous others

“In poetic prose and exquisite paintings, Drawing Botany Home is a daringly original integration of botany and memoir. It is a story of Place: the place where rooted plants grow and the place we call home, altered by the often chaotic path of our lives, the brutal history of human conquest and the Earth-altering trajectory of the Anthropocene.” —Jon Turk, author of The Raven’s Gift, Crocodiles and Ice, In the Wake of the Jomon and Tracking Lions, Myth, and Wilderness in Samburu

“Baldwin weaves botany into a very personal, and often traumatic, memoir. Her field notes and illustrations join these very disparate threads into a compelling read. This is grounded writing, in the broadest sense of the term.” —Don Gayton, author of The Sky and the Patio, Man Facing West, The Wheatgrass Mechanism, Okanagan Odyssey and Landscapes of the Interior among other titles