In 1871, Marianne North, a brilliant artist with a keen interest in botany, set-forth to travel the world on a quest to paint indigenous plants in their natural habitat. Encouraged by her friend Charles Darwin, North travelled by boat, train, mule, foot and palanquin to every continent except Antarctica. She circled the globe twice over fifteen years and accumulated an extensive and valuable collection of more than eight hundred paintings, which today comprise the esteemed Marianne North Gallery at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, London. North--high-spirited, indefatigable, and brave--also kept detailed journals, which were posthumously published in three volumes in the late 1800s. Abundant Beauty collects the most engaging writings from those journals in one edition, including rich descriptions of botanica and delightful accounts of local people and customs from her sometimes dangerous travels. Abundant Beauty is a fascinating and informative read for botanists, gardeners, historians, and armchair travellers.

An intrepid Victorian traveler and prolific painter, Marianne North produced more than eight-hundred paintings over her lifetime. She eschewed the soft pastels of typical botanical artists and instead painted entire landscapes using bold, hearty oil paints. Her collection is housed at Kew, where you can still see 848 of her paintings on display in an eponymous gallery. The Marianne North Gift Wrap is a book of twelve sheets of wrapping paper, each featuring one of North's iconic paintings. Printed on quality paper, each sheet tears out easily, leaving you with a clean edge for hassle-free wrapping. It will add some botanical brightness to any gift for the garden-lover in your life. Marianne North 100 Postcards is a box overflowing with 100 of North's beautiful paintings. Each full-color postcard features a unique illustration from the collection and it includes plants from all over the world. What more fitting tribute to a globetrotter than to send one of her postcards from your own international (or even local) adventures?

Scientist. Artist. Rule-breaker. The vibrant and daring life of Marianne North by the award-winning author of Super Women and Rachel Carson and Her Book That Changed the World. In 1882, Marianne North showed the gray city of London paintings of jaw-dropping greenery like they'd never seen before. As a self-taught artist and scientist, Marianne North subverted Victorian gender roles and advanced the field of botanical illustration. Her technique of painting specimens in their natural environment was groundbreaking. The legendary Charles Darwin was among her many supporters. Laurie Lawlor deftly chronicles North's life, from her restrictive childhood to her wild world travels to the opening of the Marianne North Gallery at Kew Gardens to her death in 1890. The North gallery at Kew Gardens remains open to the public today. Becca Stadtlander's award-winning lush, verdant artwork pairs wonderfully with the natural themes. A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection A Mighty Girl Best Book of the Year An NSTA Outstanding Science Trade Book for Students

In 1871 Marianne North escaped the swaddling of Victorian society and departed on her first expedition to make a pictorial record of the tropical and exotic plants of the world. This abridged version of her lively travel memoirs and autobiography is illustrated in colour with a selection from her collection of over 800 pictures now housed in the Marianne North gallery at Kew.

This beautifully written history traces the fortunes of Charles Darwin and his contemporaries in Chile. It explains how they showed Chileans a new way to see their own natural environment, teaching a younger generation of scientists there and forging international networks that helped to shape the modern world.

European imperialism was extraordinarily far-reaching: a key global historical process of the last 500 years. It locked disparate human societies together over a wider area than any previous imperial expansion; it underpinned the repopulation of the Americas and Australasia; it was the precursor of globalization as we now understand it. Imperialism was inseparable from the history of global environmental change. Metropolitan countries sought raw materials of all kinds, from timber and furs to rubber and oil. They established sugar plantations that transformed island ecologies. Settlers introduced new methods of farming and displaced indigenous peoples. Colonial cities, many of which became great conurbations, fundamentally changed relationships between people and nature. Consumer cultures, the internal combustion engine, and pollution are now ubiquitous. Environmental history deals with the reciprocal interaction between people and other elements in the natural world, and this book illustrates the diverse environmental themes in the history of empire. Initially concentrating on the material factors that shaped empire and environmental change, Environment and Empire discusses the way in which British consumers and manufacturers sucked in resources that were gathered, hunted, fished, mined, and farmed. Yet it is also clear that British settler and colonial states sought to regulate the use of natural resources as well as commodify them. Conservation aimed to preserve resources by exclusion, as in wildlife parks and forests, and to guarantee efficient use of soil and water. Exploring these linked themes of exploitation and conservation, this study concludes with a focus on political reassertions by colonised peoples over natural resources. In a post-imperial age, they have found a new voice, reformulating ideas about nature, landscape, and heritage and challenging, at a local and global level, views of who has the right to regulate nature.