How to Know the Wild Flowers
Introduction
How to Know the Wild Flowers: a Guide to the Names, Haunts, and Habits of our Common Wild Flowers by Mrs. William Starr Dana and Marion Satterlee and Elsie Louise Shaw was published by Charles Scribner's Sons in New York, NY in 1893. The Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania obtained a copy of the 1903 reprint edition as part of the Fritz Blank Culinary Archive and Library in 2008.
Historical Context
Frances Theodora Parsons
After the death of her husband, Frances Theodora Parsons embraced Victorian customs for widows, including the adoption of his name.[1] She also assumed a solitary lifestyle until her friend Marion Satterlee got her to resume taking walks in the countryside. [1] She then rediscovered the love for botany that she developed while spending her childhood summers away from New York City in Newburgh, New York. [1] Together, the women collected the material for this hugely successful book.[1] Parsons later went on to write a column about nature for the New York Tribune (compiled in According to Season (1894)), as well as the successive guide How to Know the Ferns (1899), and a children’s handbook called Plants and Their Children (1896). She gave up naturalist writing when she became very active in the suffrage movement, though she did also publish a memoir entitled Perchance Some Day (1951) just before her death. [1]