Wild Flowers

Wild Flowers is a collection of Emily Carr's delightfully evocative impressions of native flowers and shrubs. She wrote these short pieces later in life and they rekindled in her strong childhood memories and associations. She delights in the brightness of buttercups that "let Spring's secret out", muses over the hardiness of stonecrop ("How any plant can grow on bare rock and be so fleshy leafed and fat is a marvel.") and declares that "botanical science has un-skunked the skunk cabbage". Carr's playful words often bring a smile to readers. About catnip, she writes: "I did think it was kind of God to make a special flower for cats." In a brief Foreword and Afterword, archivist and historian Kathryn Bridge gives context to Wild Flowers within the body of Carr's previously published writings. Wild Flowers is illustrated with beautiful watercolours of wild plants by Emily Henrietta Woods, one of Carr's childhood drawing teachers in Victoria. The originals of Carr's manuscript and Woods' botanical illustrations reside in collections of the BC Archives; neither have been published until now. "Woods' paintings fit so well with Carr's text. It's serendipity that Woods taught Carr and that we have her art and Carr's manuscript in the Archives' collection, and that neither have been published before now." - Kathryn Bridge

Beloved Canadian artist and writer Emily Carr (13 December 1871 to 2 March 1945) was born in Victoria, British Columbia. She studied art in the USA, England and France until 1911, when she moved back to British Columbia. Carr was most heavily influenced by the landscapes and First Nations cultures of British Columbia and Alaska. In the 1920s she came into contact with members of the Group of Seven and was later invited to submit her works for inclusion in a Group of Seven exhibition. They named her The Mother of Modern Arts about five years later. Emily Henrietta Woods (1852-1916) came to Victoria from Ireland in 1865. Her talent for art gained her employment as a drawing teacher, and Emily Carr was one of her students. But her life's work was the creation of over 200 life-size watercolours of wild flowers, some of which appear in this book.