A 19th-century American nature classic finally appears in French
Frances Theodora Parsons's 1894 collection of botanical essays, long a touchstone of American nature writing, has been translated as «Nos saisons. Promenades d'une botaniste».
Published in French for the first time, «Nos saisons. Promenades d'une botaniste» brings to French-language readers a book that has stood as a staple of American nature writing since 1894, according to Le Temps. The original, titled According to Season: Talks About the Flowers in the Order of Their Appearance in the Woods and Fields, gathered articles the American naturalist Frances Theodora Parsons (1861-1952) had written for the New York Tribune.
Parsons came to botany after the death of her first husband, when she took to long walks through the New York countryside with her friend, the illustrator Marion Satterlee, according to Le Temps. Those walks led to her first book, How to Know the Wild Flowers (1893), the first guide to wildflowers of North America, which found early admirers in Theodore Roosevelt and Rudyard Kipling.
According to Season followed in 1894 and became a classic in its own right. Le Temps describes it as written under the sign of Henry David Thoreau, the writer with whom Parsons shared a devotion to the freedom found in immersion in nature. The book moves through the botanical and the meditative at once, turning the seasonal cycle of woods and fields into what Le Temps calls a sensitive and spiritual experience.
The French edition appears under the title Nos saisons. Promenades d'une botaniste.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.