Early Victorian England, a time which saw the cradling and nurturing some of the great Romantic literary and artistic movements of the 19th century, also gave rise to many significant scientific achievements, particularly in the disciplines of Natural History. Transcending most class and gender restrictions and becoming a favourite pastime of village vicars, ladies of leisure, and squires alike, botanical pursuits encompassed anyone with a penchant for the outdoors and the ability to commit their findings to paper. Of great popularity, and bolstered with the world-wide acceptance of the Linnaean system of classification some 50 years previously, botanists, both amateur and professional, traipsed about the countryside cataloguing the British Flora.

A vicar's daughter who was born in the west of England in 1811, Miss Emily Stackhouse developed a keen interest in Botany and devoted her life to painting and studying plants. She did not limit herself to wildflowers as did so many others, but gave equal status to mosses and grasses, as well as fungi. Apart from having a unique understanding of the habitats in Cornwall, she was able to benefit from travel to other parts of England, including the Lake District and East Anglia, as well as Ireland. Wherever she went she increased her knowledge of the world of Flora and gained new insights into watercolour technique.

A supremely talented watercolourist, Miss Stackhouse created these delicately crafted depictions of British plants for botanical study, both for herself and for those in her close circle of Cornish Naturalists. Originally meant for scientific analysis, her Drawings of British Plants have such an exquisite beauty that they are truly works of art in their own right, certainly offering her credible comparison with the greatest botanical artists of any era.

Apart from collecting and classifying flora and writing careful captions to her water- colours and herbariums, Miss Emily Stackhouse wrote for journals, and one of her articles, "Rare Plants in the Neighbourhood of Truro", is reproduced and illustrated with her paintings in this volume. For other texts, it is possible to turn to a Church of England clergyman, The Reverend Charles Alexander Johns, who wrote copiously and authoritatively on flora in several books which contained many illustrations derived from Emily Stackhouse's work. Because of the relevance and importance of his writings, extracts are used in this book to describe the plants and their habitats thus providing a context for the illustrations.

The Reverend C.A. Johns, also of Cornish descent and born in 1811, provided some of the more entertaining "ramble" books of the day. With a natural exuberance and fearless disposition, he possessed the gift of expressing his zealousness in words. The genre of rambling books had begun some years before, but needed the influence of the Romantic Era to inspire interest in the countryside with a style of writing which would convey this to the populace. Many country vicars, such as Johns, earnestly wished to eloquently align the goodness and greatness of Nature with the Almighty. In this way, these literary preachers could enlighten vast congregations by extolling the virtues of nature through accounts of their own personal transcendental experiences during stimulating countryside rambles.

And what a readership! Johns' enormously popular book, Flowers of the Field, went through over 50 editions with a variety of publishers, both here and abroad, ending with a final edition in 1949, two years shy of the 100th anniversary of initial publication. It was this "magnum opus" which contained "charming" woodcuts taken from original drawings contributed by a long unknown artist. According to contemporary reports, much of the book's popularity was a direct result of these very illustrations, some of which appeared in further of Johns' oeuvre including A Week at the Lizard and Forest Trees of Britain, thus helping to insure that these books were eagerly sought after by the public. But while Johns' fame was virtually assured, the emergence of Miss Emily Stackhouse as the contributing illustrator has only been recently discovered.

Only now, in this publication, can the immense talent of Emily Stackhouse be fully appreciated and enjoyed for the first time in conjunction with the writings which her watercolours helped inspire. Over 150 years later, we now have this unique opportunity of enjoying a lasting excursion into the quiet byways of the Victorian Countryside.