FORGOTTEN FIELD

(Reprinted from 'Country Life', July 6, 1995)

The phrase “Flowers of the Field” conjures up not only the delights of a Summer’s Day, but also the title of one of the most beloved of all botanical books, published in 1851. Two London exhibitions of the same name are displaying exquisite botanical watercolours and woodcuts from the book, on the occasion of the 125th anniversary of the death of artist Emily Stackhouse, whose responsibility for the illustrations has until now, never been credited.

The story begins with the advent of the ‘rambling book’ in early 19th century England. Rambling seems to have embraced this era with all the romanticism of the day. A popular pursuit, it transcended class and gender restrictions to encompass anyone who had a penchant for the outdoors and the ability to commit their findings to paper. The approach was non-scientific and the writing laced with romantic passages expressing the beauty and variety of the countryside.

The Reverend Charles Alexander Johns was not the first exponent o of this style of writing, but he certainly provided most entertaining examples. With a natural exuberance, he possessed the gift of expressing his zeal in words. Although his first publications were mainly in the rambling genre, Johns is best remembered for his later works, “A Week at the Lizard”, “The Forest Trees of Britain”, and the Bible of the amateur botanist, “Flowers of the Field”.

This remarkable compendium of the British Flora, first published in a two-volume set in 1851, was still in print in the 1970’s. But while Johns’s fame was virtually assured, the chances of any recognition for his favourite illustrator, Emily Stackhouse, have been bound up for the past 140 years in three leather volumes containing 629 carefully crafted botanical watercolors. Treasured by her descendants, but unknown to scholars, they reveal the tremendous contribution made to Johns’s works by this quiet and unassuming botanist.

Born in the West Country in 1811, the same year as Johns, Miss Stackhouse developed a keen interest in natural history and devoted her life to painting and classifying the British Flora. From her family estate, Trehane, in Cornwall, she travelled throughout England and Ireland in her search for rare species. Her great-uncle, John Stackhouse, was a highly esteemed botanist, and the Reverend Thomas ’Bible’ Stackhouse was a distant relation.

Miss Stackhouse would never considered herself one of those ’ladies of leisure’ so encouraged by Lindley and Loudon and decried by Ruskin. Her family holdings may have made her a lady of means, but the primary importance of this was that the family carriage was readily available to her. She delighted in travelling about the countryside, painting her delicately coloured drawings on the spot and slopping about in her favourite haunts--bogs and watery places--as she was fond of inscribing on her watercolors.

Miss Stackhouse never married and took an active, public role in her botanical pursuits; she became a life member of both the Royal Institution of Cornwall and the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society. She exhibited specimens and her watercolors at the latter, and had two articles published, ’Musci, Natives of Cornwall’ and ’Rare Plants in the Neighbourhood of Truro’, in the RIC Journal. As her eyesight began to fail in the late 1850’s, she started to concentrate on collection dried specimens, until illness forced her to buy a house near the Royal Infirmary in Truro. However, she remained reasonably active until succumbing to a severe attack of apoplexy in 1870, just before her 59th birthday.

Her most productive period was in the 1840’s when she must have met the irrepressible Johns through mutual acquaintances in the Polytechnic Society. Their first collaboration was “Forest Trees of Britain” (1847-49) and then followed “A Week at the Lizard” (1848) and “Flowers of the Field” (1851). All reference dictionaries listing botanist’s biographies credit Miss Stackhouse with a portion of the illustrations contained in the first two books, but to date there has been no suggestion that some of her drawings were shared among all three, and that she was responsible for most of the plates in the most widely revered of these three books, “Flowers of the Field”.

In his laudatory preface written at the behest of Sir Joseph Hooker, G.S. Boulger, editor of a turn-of-the-century reprint of “Flowers”, stated: ’The excellence of Miss Johns’s illustrations have undoubtedly contributed largely to the success of her brother Charles’s chief work.’ He assumed that the credit belonged to Emily Johns, the eldest of the trio of artistic Johns sisters, who had collaborated with their brother in several Victorian gardening handbooks.

Some 70 years later, the waters were muddied further by the appearance of an article by Gerald Hamilton-Edwards in the ‘Western Morning News’ proposing a minor Victorian painter by the name of Eliza Allen (née Stevens). Born in Plymouth in 1842, Miss Stevens was a youthful student of Julia Johns. A victim of his own enthusiasm at the prospect of discovering that his distant relation was a child prodigy, the eminent genealogist did not take into account the fact that Miss Stevens would have been only five years old at the publication of “Forest Trees of Britain” in 1847. Unfortunately, this article was most influential.

Research in Johns and Miss Stackhouse led to the archives at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, and there the truth of the matter became evident when a letter from Miss Stackhouse to Sir William Hooker was located in a volume of correspondence. She most politely asks him if he would care to be the beneficiary of her watercolour collection as ‘woodcuts taken from them have been published in “Flowers of the Field” and other little books by the Reverend C.A. Johns’.

Comparison of the original watercolours with the 400 first-edition illustrations, shows that more than 150 of these, some initialed ES and some blank, represent a mirror image of the original. A further 100 illustrations either bear a close resemblance to a particular watercolour or are signed ES in the plate, but are not represented and were probably lost, damaged, or given away to Johns. Some illustrations can be attributed to Miss Stackhouse on stylistic grounds. Others were taken from William Curtis’s “Flora Londinensis of 1777-98, a normal practice in these early cost-cutting days. A few a signed by Johns or his sister Julia, and the remaining 70 or so were lifted from other illustrated books, some of which were possibly by Emily and Anne Johns.

Here is irrefutable evidence of the efforts of Miss Emily Stackhouse. Unfortunately, these exquisite paintings, eclipsing any of the numerous colour plates in later reprints of “Flowers of the Field”, remained quietly in the bookcases of her descendants. It is indeed a shame that their existence was not known until recently, as a brilliant publication might have been made even better by their inclusion.